Argentine director Lucrecia Martel isn't interested in landscape or décor -- she frames her actors in very tight close-ups without establishing shots and, ordinarily, we have to construe their location from almost subliminal clues at the edge of the frame. However, her 2008 film, The Headless Woman, begins with a sequence that is an exception to this rule: we see boys playing with a dog, quarreling, and jumping in and out of a big concrete-lined trough of a drainage ditch, much of this filmed in medium to long shot. We see a dusty landscape, some battered roadside signs that serve as gymnasium equipment for the impoverished kids playing in the deep concrete channel; a gravel road winds along the side of the ditch, tracking its course. This sequence is, in fact, one that establishes a landscape vital to the enigma posed by the film. An upper middle-class woman, Vero, is driving home along this gravel road, apparently a short-cut to the suburb where she lives in Salto in Argentina's northwest province -- the area is on the Bolivian border. Vero is unapologetically vain and self-centered: she has dyed her hair platinum-blonde, an unbecoming "look" on her to be honest and has been chatting with others of her class about building some kind of swimming pool for the country club to which she belongs. On the short-cut, while answering her cell-phone, Vero hits some thing (or some things) -- there are two hard impacts, she bangs her head on windshield, and, in the rear view mirror, sees a dog lying dead on the gravel road next to the deep drainage ditch. But there are also little handprints on her side window: were those made by the children playing around her car at the country club or did she hit one of the boys playing with the dog, knocking him off the roadway into the ditch? Although the evidence is ambiguous due to the topography of the accident scene -- Vero doesn't get out of the car until later, when a torrential downpour occurs flushing out the ditch -- Martel's heroine comes to conclude that she has killed someone in a hit-and-run accident.
Vero is disoriented by the crash and suffered minor head trauma. The world seems strange to her and alien. Martel's technique makes it very difficult to work out relationships between people in Vero's milieu -- are the women around her cousins? There are two men who look, more or less, alike -- both of them grope her affectionately. One of these men is her husband and the other seems to be a doctor who is her brother --but I never could construe which was which. (Martel's vision of Argentine family life, at least in Salto, involves lots of intimate contact that makes it difficult for a Gringo viewer to figure out who is a lover and who is merely a close friend or family member.) Everyone in the film seems precariously poised on the brink of dementia. An elderly Aunt named Lala sees people who are long-dead and says that Vero's voice has become "strange" -- when she warns Vero about the dead inhabiting the house, we see out-of-focus a brown-skinned Indian boy, similar to the kids playing by the ditch. Is this a ghost or just one of the children of the various identically brown-skinned Indian servants who seem to work for the family? Spooky events occur. The water fails at home or runs rusty in a hotel -- a weird flash startles the viewer until we see that someone is welding in a closet in Vero's house (apparently fixing the pipes). People stare in horror at Vero's damaged car but we never see what they are looking at. Vero's husband inexplicably brings some sort of dead animal to the house -- it looks like a dog but is perhaps a goat -- and tells the maid to hose it down before skinning it. A gardener digging in Vero's lawn discovers that some kind of pool or fountain is buried in the soil. When Vero goes back to the hospital, presumably to get her x-rays so that there will be no trace of her being seen after the accident, she finds that her brother has already purged the record. After the crash, she stayed at a hotel in the city; but there is no record of that visit either. In the end, Vero who is a dentist sees poor children at a city school and schedules them for dental treatment. Then, with the two men, she goes to the hotel and there is some kind of celebration.
The Headless Woman is clearly about a divide between the classes in Argentina and a parable about the desaparecidos ("the disappeared ones") killed during the military dictatorship. The narcissistic and heedless Vero is not a bad person, just someone who is indifferent to others. The Argentine vice is not necessarily malign cruelty but negligence and forgetfulness. When Vero finds herself in a slum near the place where she has lived all her life, she panics and can't find her way out of the maze of dirt lanes and concrete-block huts -- the camera watches over her shoulder as she drives in the slum, its streets crowded, and we have sickening feeling that she is going to run someone else down. Indeed, Martel is a master of suggesting the imminence of a bad accident -- we are always waiting for the motorcycle to slide out of control or the child to drown in the pool or the gardener to fall off his ladder -- this sense of impending casualty was Martel's trademark in La Cienaga, her first film, a picture that also exploited a swimming pool as a symbol of upper class privilege. The cruel truth shown in The Headless Woman is that no one cares if Vero ran over a slum kid and that everyone is complicit in making this inconvenient fact vanish.
Compared to La Cienaga and The Holy Girl, I thought The Headless Woman was a bit like its middle-aged heroine -- a bit skinny, too self-involved, and too slender to bear the weight of meaning imposed on its (almost) non-existent story. The film confirms Martel's technical brilliance and demonstrates her complete control over the material. I just wish the material was a little more substantive.
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