The Headless Woman

Writer/director Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman follows a woman through a state of ambivalent agency, in which every privilege effectively diminishes her. The psychology also examines Argentina’s class structure. It’s a world where a privileged white professional can kill a peasant child as if he were a dog. The woman is headless because she’s mindless, living in suspension from reality and integrity. 

The film opens on a scene of four urchins and a dog playing by a desolate road. One may well be the boy Veronica — possibly — kills when she hits at least a dog in a highway collision. The bumps suggest more than one body hit the road. In the second scene the privileged characters have taken their more privileged children to a swimming pool, which has been complicated by the addition of dangerous sea turtles. Their only danger is exotica. The contrast between the two groups of boys provides an explicit political context to the examination of the hollow power of a privileged woman. 

The film is difficult to watch and to penetrate because Martel forces us into Veronica’s frame of mind. She drifts through her scenes without focus or attention to others. Her traumatic collision intensifies her alienation and self-concern. Many shots are dark, many veiled, many in soft focus, with a soundtrack that similarly suggests the fading in and out of incidental, disparate noises. A welder’s loud and bright blast by the shower jolts us as much as her.  Her post-collision fog is counteracted by the car radio playing Nina Mouskouri’s Soleil Soleil.  

When she visits her bedridden mother we see an extended version of Veronica. She’s aware of the presence of the dead but can’t remember her family’s names and her grandchildren. 

Despite her social status, affluence and professional career as a dentist, our heroine proves remarkably powerless. Her brother owns and runs the clinic and covers for her when she can’t work. Her adultery with her husband’s cousin seems more of a passive drift than passion. Though her husband deflects her sense that she may have killed someone, the men in her life — instinctively, without open collusion — cover for her, to save her from responsibility. Her brother takes away the hospital records that would have implicated her in the accident. Her husband has her seriously dented car fixed. Even her hotel reservation is disappeared. As the men erase her involvement in the incident they also erase her will, responsibility and character. Their aid diminishes her. So, too, everyone cuts “Veronica” down to “Vero,” an echo of “truth.”

The dog Veronica kills is paralleled by the dead deer her husband brings back for the servants to skin and to harvest. Both demonstrate the family’s power over life, death and the lower classes. Her perfunctory offers to the urchin serving her show a weak nod at social responsibility. The repeated references to a pool excavated behind the vet’s and the canal plugged by the corpses suggest a nature replicated to be controlled by man, as Vero is. She becomes water when she erupts into tears while showering, fully dressed. When she’s consoled by the handy welder she remains the helpless lady.
When we first see Veronica she’s complimented for her new blond hairdo. We’re meeting a posed Vero, the real version of which we won’t see till she returns to her dark normalcy at the end, having safely put her traumatic accident behind her. In one shot she wears her blonde hair pinned back in a precise allusion to the pose Kim Novak’s Madeleine wears in Vertigo, when she’s arranged by one man to seduce another man to cover for the first one’s murder of his wife. As Madeleine’s hair is supposed to present her as the reincarnation of the famed Carlotta, the allusion here suggests Veronica is a front, not in control of her life but arranged to serve her men. Her elegance, station and putative power are a fatal flaw.