La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman) is a fascinating and engrossing film that explores issues such as guilt, repression and denial. Verónica is a middle class dentist living in the north of Argentina. You cannot pin down the precise time this film is set (the director Lucrecia Martel explains in an interview in this month’s Sight & Sound that it is intentional to blur the exact period). Verónica is driving along a road where she hits something. She is not sure what. She looks back at the road and sees what is thought to be a dog. After that she disconnects from the real world, she evades responsibility by not contacting the police, there’s no consequence for her actions hence this trance like state (she visits the hospital and then stays in a hotel). She is in a fugue state. Eventually she tells her husband who orchestrates a cover-up, from Verónica’s visit to the hospital to the stay in the hotel. Nobody in Verónica’s world gives a damn whether she killed someone, it is all about using influence and power to cover this crime up. Even though it is still unclear whether Verónica actually hit a person. All we know is that a child’s body is found in the nearby canal, drowned. Further into the film Verónica displays aspects of guilt especially when a young boy comes to the house to offer to clean her car. She gives various items to the boy possibly to salve her own guilty conscience. Yet at the same time there’s a specific scene that elicits distaste when Verónica, while talking to her husband, is examining the front of her car minus a dent and in the background is the cousin of boy she may have killed carrying gardening items into her house.
Again, the interview with Martel in this month’s Sight & Sound highlights various aspects of the film. Verónica and her husband have many servants who are indigenous whilst many of the middle class people in Argentina are descendants of European immigration. Martel explained that this also exposes Spanish colonialism. The servants know their place in the class hierarchy. The film also highlights a very masculine way of dealing with things, when it comes to the cover-up and making the hit and run ‘go away’ it is left to the men in her life, while Verónica with other female relatives spend time in specific carer roles. There is a stark demarcation between gender roles. The viewer also doesn’t know much about the child who has been found in the canal nor of the people who live in poorer surrounding areas. Instead we are exposed to the conspiracy and cover-up by Verónica and her family. Martel makes the point that when hit and runs involve an indigenous victim it is treated with a ‘who cares’ attitude and that is powerfully brought to the forefront of the film. Martel, as well, was brought up during the Junta period, she wanted to link the dead body we don’t see but hear the horrific noise of something being hit with the desaparecidos.
The links are hinted at as opposed to being something that the audience are lectured with. The result is that the political underpinning of the film functions as a feeling that there is something disturbing in the background that is left unseen. It is all the more powerful for that.
