Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman

The Headless Woman 

In many ways, Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, explores the dangers of erasing both personal and historical memory as it recounts the aftermath of an accident. Driving back from a family gathering, Veronica or Vero (Maria Onetto), an elegant, middle-aged dentist, hits something (perhaps a dog? a child?) as she searches for her ringing cellphone, leaving her confused and disoriented. The film explores the mystery of this event in relation to both class and gender differences, but it also heightens the impact of these disparities by aligning them with Argentina’s public memory.

On another level, then, The Headless Woman connects Vero’s disorientation with blurred historical memories associated with Argentina’s dirty war, a seven-year campaign by the Argentine government against suspected dissidents and subversives. From 1976-1983, military juntas maintained power by secretly abducting, torturing, and killing from 10-30 thousand people, now known as “the disappeared” because their identities were virtually erased from public memory.

In an interview with Reverse Shot’s Chris Wisniewski, Martel explains this connection well: “you can have doubts about whether she kills someone or not. But the film is very clear with how she decides to deal with this possibility, and how the family and social class decide to react to the situation. There is a beautiful and at the same time horrifying mechanism in society: if you want to protect someone, you can disown his or her responsibility across his or her class. This sounds really beautiful, but it only works for some layers of society. The film reveals a blurred moment of a woman’s life, and shows how things become more secure by making certain things disappear."

In The Headless Woman, however, this bifurcation by gender, class, and ideology also extends to the natural world. The lower class characters play a peripheral role in the film as not only outside Vero’s class, but also outside the urban culture she occupies. Boys and their dog, on the other hand, occupy a more pastoral world of wild nature. They run through a forest and work in a nursery, for example. Even Vero’s servants maintain a connection to the natural world of the garden surrounding Vero’s home.

 In The Headless Woman, memory is at the center, as Vero and her middle-class family conceal evidence of her possible guilt in what could be a hit and run accident. As Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian declares, “It is a masterly, disturbing and deeply mysterious film about someone who strenuously conceals from herself the knowledge of her own guilt,” but it is also a film about public loss of multiple layers of the disappeared, losses that include both human and nonhuman nature.