Director/writer: Lucrecia Martel
Photography: Barbara Alvarez
Music: Roberta Ainstein
Editor: Miguel Schverdfinger
Cast: Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Ines Efron, Cesar Bordon, Daniel Genoud, Guillermo Arengo, Maria Vaner
According to internet sources such as Google Translate, the original Spanish title for this movie, La mujer sin cabeza, does indeed appear to translate directly to “the headless woman,” although results suspiciously include links to information about showings of this movie, which made me think the phrase may be specifically idiomatic in some way. My very first thought was that it might be some kind of pun on the part of the translator for “the heedless woman,” as that is an obvious quality of the woman in question at the center of this picture, Vero (Maria Onetto). She is bourgeois, a professional dentist, middle-aged, well-coiffed, married with children and a lover, and appears to have a busy, somewhat empty social life. She appears to be numb, in short.
Early in the movie, on her way home from an elegant afternoon gathering, Vero’s cell phone rings in the car, she is momentarily distracted, and she runs over something. She sits in her car gathering herself, obviously shaken by the incident. But she never gets out of the car to investigate, does not really look at anything, not even in her rearview mirror. She only composes herself, taking deep breaths, and then drives on, jaw clenched basically for the rest of the movie. As she leaves the scene, we see the corpse of a dog on the road. But she has not seen it. And now, for the rest of the movie, she quietly falls apart in a self-controlled way that makes it very difficult to see she is falling apart at all, except for a worsening case of disaffection, which could simply be the modern condition, yes? She seems to me to be more exactly heedless than someone who has lost her head, momentarily or otherwise, because of a crisis. In her deeply controlled panic she is still rational enough to act as if the rules don’t apply to her if she can get away with it
According to internet sources such as Google Translate, the original Spanish title for this movie, La mujer sin cabeza, does indeed appear to translate directly to “the headless woman,” although results suspiciously include links to information about showings of this movie, which made me think the phrase may be specifically idiomatic in some way. My very first thought was that it might be some kind of pun on the part of the translator for “the heedless woman,” as that is an obvious quality of the woman in question at the center of this picture, Vero (Maria Onetto). She is bourgeois, a professional dentist, middle-aged, well-coiffed, married with children and a lover, and appears to have a busy, somewhat empty social life. She appears to be numb, in short.
Early in the movie, on her way home from an elegant afternoon gathering, Vero’s cell phone rings in the car, she is momentarily distracted, and she runs over something. She sits in her car gathering herself, obviously shaken by the incident. But she never gets out of the car to investigate, does not really look at anything, not even in her rearview mirror. She only composes herself, taking deep breaths, and then drives on, jaw clenched basically for the rest of the movie. As she leaves the scene, we see the corpse of a dog on the road. But she has not seen it. And now, for the rest of the movie, she quietly falls apart in a self-controlled way that makes it very difficult to see she is falling apart at all, except for a worsening case of disaffection, which could simply be the modern condition, yes? She seems to me to be more exactly heedless than someone who has lost her head, momentarily or otherwise, because of a crisis. In her deeply controlled panic she is still rational enough to act as if the rules don’t apply to her if she can get away with it
But maybe! Argentine director and writer Lucrecia Martel plays these events so subtly it’s possible Vero is trying to will herself into believing nothing happened at all. Yet she keeps worrying these events and the aftermath. Down the road she pulls off and gets out of the car, where she’s caught in a rainstorm just starting (here and at other places in the picture Vero is shot from the neck down, point of view in this case from inside the car, emphasizing her headlessness). The storm is amazingly intense—one character discusses the water reaching to the gearshift in his car. We hear about this storm later and its intensity, but we don’t see much of it. Vero, worrying it, seems to think the body of whoever she ran over could have been washed away into the canal that runs alongside the road.
We know the probability is that it was the dog we saw as she drove away, but The Headless Woman is determinedly understated about everything it is telling us. It has the narrative arc of A Woman Under the Influence but Martel plays it very low-key. Unseemly outbursts are just not acceptable here—that’s the code of the wealthy class under study, the way they prefer to keep things. Vero plays by the rules she knows. When she tries to talk about the accident with others, such as her husband, they brush it away. Her husband gaslights her about it, assures her nothing serious could have happened, that she is overthinking it too much, etc. And she is! But Vero has obviously been undermined by it, can’t stop worrying it. She doesn’t want to be held accountable, but something is gnawing at her from the inside. Is that humanity calling?
I’m not sure what happened to elevate Lucrecia Martel in the annals of the lists of cineaste preferences at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT), but I went from being happily unaware of her a year ago to finding three of her movies in my way this year—Zama, La Cienega, and now The Headless Woman. Zama, a reasonably epic historical story of colonialism, was the one I liked the most, in part because its actual story was most legible. La Cienega left me mostly baffled—Martel is a skillful filmmaker, but narrative seems to fall more into her lower priorities.
Just so, The Headless Woman loses me nearly as much as La Cienega. My animus against the bourgeoisie is perhaps not as keen as Martel’s. Sending them up subtly just starts to seem too subtle to me. Maybe I expected or wanted something more melodramatic from the summaries: an accident on a lonely road, a woman tormented by guilt, did she or didn’t she? And things like that. She ran over a dog, always a sad story on some level. But a very small one too. She didn’t bother to check because she thought it might be a person, and then she fled the scene. Perhaps it was a person—the clues are there. Now she feels guilty, which doesn’t suit her comfortable, anodyne life. But she doesn’t want to lose or abandon this comfortable life either. The trials of the rich and their privilege—so mundane, so maddening, so alienating.
We know the probability is that it was the dog we saw as she drove away, but The Headless Woman is determinedly understated about everything it is telling us. It has the narrative arc of A Woman Under the Influence but Martel plays it very low-key. Unseemly outbursts are just not acceptable here—that’s the code of the wealthy class under study, the way they prefer to keep things. Vero plays by the rules she knows. When she tries to talk about the accident with others, such as her husband, they brush it away. Her husband gaslights her about it, assures her nothing serious could have happened, that she is overthinking it too much, etc. And she is! But Vero has obviously been undermined by it, can’t stop worrying it. She doesn’t want to be held accountable, but something is gnawing at her from the inside. Is that humanity calling?
I’m not sure what happened to elevate Lucrecia Martel in the annals of the lists of cineaste preferences at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT), but I went from being happily unaware of her a year ago to finding three of her movies in my way this year—Zama, La Cienega, and now The Headless Woman. Zama, a reasonably epic historical story of colonialism, was the one I liked the most, in part because its actual story was most legible. La Cienega left me mostly baffled—Martel is a skillful filmmaker, but narrative seems to fall more into her lower priorities.
Just so, The Headless Woman loses me nearly as much as La Cienega. My animus against the bourgeoisie is perhaps not as keen as Martel’s. Sending them up subtly just starts to seem too subtle to me. Maybe I expected or wanted something more melodramatic from the summaries: an accident on a lonely road, a woman tormented by guilt, did she or didn’t she? And things like that. She ran over a dog, always a sad story on some level. But a very small one too. She didn’t bother to check because she thought it might be a person, and then she fled the scene. Perhaps it was a person—the clues are there. Now she feels guilty, which doesn’t suit her comfortable, anodyne life. But she doesn’t want to lose or abandon this comfortable life either. The trials of the rich and their privilege—so mundane, so maddening, so alienating.
I don't know this one. Only Zama. But your description made me think of Safe, Haynes' psychological horror thing from the '90s.
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