Results

A woman believes she killed a boy with her car. Whether or not she actually did is irrelevant. The scene of the accident is disconcerting and we might spend the entire film looking for clues pointing to a definite answer. Many viewers have done this, and I did as well during my second viewing. However, it was during this second viewing that I realized that my detective work was largely unnecessary. What matters is that the woman believes she is a killer and that she does not react accordingly. Even after the collision, she does not turn back to survey the aftermath. She drives on and dooms her subsequent days to seemingly endless doubt and distress.

What she collides against, exactly, remains off-screen. A later shot reveals a dog carcass, but it is just as likely that a human body bounced off the car and fell into the nearby storm channel beyond the camera’s gaze. The Headless Woman occupies the remainder of its running time following the hit-and-run driver, floating next to her head or beside her body, watching as she interacts with out-of-focus crowds, chronicling her fragile emotions as remorse disrupts her privileged-class complacency. There are plenty of secondary characters, but the script is not very interested in letting us know who they are, an effect that is partly ameliorated in the subtitled version, where even whispers are printed clearly on the screen. For those who understand Spanish, however, there is no hierarchy: lines do not argue in favor of their unique importance, nor does the exposition announce its arrival with all-too-relevant information. We receive every word equally. Each one of us must parse through the thorns of dialogue and locate the narrative, since the film does not tell us what to recall. Everything is fuzzy and barely-heard. Only our immersive effort can clarify the occasion. We know the woman has a brother and that she runs a dental clinic with him. We even see this brother several times throughout the movie. Yet we do not really get to see his face until well into the second half. Relationships between family members might require independent Internet research to fully apprehend. As with the truth of the accident, however, our ignorance is acceptable. We perceive how the family feels about itself and how its members feel about each other, even if we cannot reproduce a satisfying picture of the metaphoric tree. It might require two viewings to locate the brother, but that says a lot about what his sister thinks of him, or more precisely, how she does not think of him.

Lucrecia Martel - whose career has been in constant ascent since the release of La Cienaga in 2001, followed by The Holy Girl in 2004 - has infuriated as many naysayers as she has garnered fans. Her biggest sin, according to the former group, is to disregard plot. Her second biggest sin is to disregard conventional characterization. Her third biggest sin is to concentrate on unlikable characters. There is only one sin that I will grant, and that is that she tickles the ghost of Michelangelo Antonioni a bit too much for comfort. But that sin does not get nearly as much airtime as the aforementioned trio, the sinfulness of which completely escapes me.

The Headless Woman will not convert her detractors. It is stubbornly diffuse, replete with odd close-ups and a persistent lack of long shots or even medium shots. Establishing shots are rare and occasionally appear at the end of scenes, after our thirst for the comprehension of space has withered. Dialogue is uttered outside of the frame, while the camera dwells on peripheral action. The protagonist communicates with spectral people lingering in the blurry background. There is character development, but almost none of it occurs through speech. Most of it emerges through quotidian details: lights flaring up inside a bathroom, children playing ahead of a car, slow motion commencing without warning, loneliness succeeding a crowd-scene, silence following dispersed chatter, stares implying hidden lust, flirting at the edges of the frame, smiles concealing corruption, social gatherings through glass doorways, the shattered double-images produced by the glassy reflections reminding us of Antonioni’s La Notte. The titular woman hopes to forget the accident, yet her naive goal is undermined by an incessant stream of objects and bodies that animates her memory. She eventually buckles under the weight of her anxiety and admits her guilt. Unfortunately, this mea culpa is directed at her family members. Rather than encourage her display of honesty, they convince her of her own innocence, and when the police discover a dead body stinking up the drainage canals, they obliterate all evidence incriminating her, destroying hotel and medical records.

This particular plot element - as murkily outlined as everything else in the film - has led to a lot of talk about the film being an allegory for the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Martel herself, during interviews, encourages this connection by highlighting her inclusion of anachronistic music to obliquely reference the era ¹. That said, I do not see what we can gain by reducing The Headless Woman to a simplistic game of connect-the-dots, or worse, connect-the-words: get two columns of terms and connect the related pairs with various lines. (I remember those from kindergarten and have retained a vivid memory of the ugliness produced by the resulting mass of squiggly pencil marks. Sometimes, I would try to lessen the ugliness by making each line of a different color, a tactic that dissipated none of the ugliness, although a multicolored mess is admittedly more eye-catching than its monochrome equal.) I prefer to think of The Headless Woman as an echo rather than a straight allegory. To Martel, the anachronistic music suggests that the dishonesty of these modern day characters finds its likeness in the self-delusion of their seventies counterparts - likeness, echo, and similarity; not facsimile. The Headless Woman is too obsessed with twenty-first-century concerns to be so retrograde. It merely (but not unimportantly) implies that, while the military government might be dead and buried, the conservative us-against-them close-knit ideology that made it possible has not suffered such a glad fate.

This is simplifying the film as well, for The Headless Woman does not bludgeon. It can bludgeon, but only if we limit ourselves to notice a specific theme and allow it to dominate our view of the proceeds. Otherwise, the film is too relaxed and vague to serve as any kind of one-note polemic. The social, racial, and cultural strata on display are constantly in flux: everybody mixing with everybody at the same time as each group sticks to its own constituents. Martel describes the situation as one of separate classes living on parallel tracks, as opposed to the typical upstairs-downstairs dichotomy ². This is accurate, not only as a description of the film, but also as a description of Argentine reality. There are separate neighborhoods for each class and the quality of the housing is obviously disparate, yet there is also frequent sharing of personal space, especially since the darker-skinned lower class serves the utilitarian needs of the lighter-skinned higher class. What is not shared is awareness: the latter does not quite ignore the former - indeed, the protagonist offers sandwiches and the like, there is communication across class boundaries, etc - but there is a mutual understanding that both live as if on opposing sides of the glass doorway that separates us from the main characters during the final shot. Martel gives us social separation ruled not necessarily by tangible space so much as mental space - a good fit for a film that is largely about one woman’s mental space and her perception of the world around her. This is a uniquely subjective view of social separation, in the sense that the separation happens partly because the characters are circumscribed to invisible demarcations that they mostly imagine.

When the protagonist is besotted by fears of having run over someone from the opposing side of her imagined demarcations, her forget-me-forget-me-not memory-gymnastics cause her not only to consider the demarcations - she begins to notice the outsiders, the dark-skinned boys, anything that reminds her of the accident - but to potentially intensify them just as she fails to break them down, doing so to the point that she begins excluding those from her own caste. Thus, everyone she knows and could know is excised until she is left standing all lonely in a hotel lobby, the slow-motion kicking in to give her a space-woman effect, her feet miraculously holding onto the ground during her zero-gravity hovering. At long last, her demarcations allow for only one inhabitant: herself. When she returns to her family and friends, it smells of defeat, like Christine at the end of The Rules of the Game. Unable to attain peace-of-mind, she gives up and lifelessly lets the current carry her wherever it may. The Headless Woman is finally about illusion, imagination, delusion, and lunacy, a woman trying to relate to society through a distorted mirror. Like all distorted mirrors, the visible image is based on something true - a body, a room, an object. But if we cannot see the original shape in front of the mirror, if all we have is the weird reflection, then we are bound to make mistakes. Our hit-and-run driver of a protagonist can only fathom the twisted outlines of what might possibly resemble whatever real world she cannot see directly. Her distance from everything outside of her own turmoil is the most debilitating of her shortcomings.