The literal translation of Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel’s psychological drama La mujer sin cabeza is “woman without a head”. That better suggests the state of discombobulating shock that her middle-aged, upper middle-class protagonist Vero (María Onetto) finds herself in after she hits something on the road that she believes is a 10-year-old boy from a poor neighbourhood. We see the slumped body through the rear window. The small human handprints on the side window are unmistakable.
Dentist Vero walks through subsequent events in a daze, reporting her head injury, but walking away when asked to fill in forms. She is agitated when police appear in a hospital toilet, coaxing out a prisoner hiding in a cubicle. She checks into a hotel and has sex with her “cousin”, Juan Mañuel, after he spies her in a café window. For a few days afterwards, she explains that she hit a dog, but we see her wincing under the strain, her lower class servants a reminder of her victim. Then, in conversation with her brother, she cracks.
Martel keeps us in suspense as to how Vero’s inner turmoil will manifest itself, especially as her proximity to the victim’s family gets ever closer. However, this is also an examination of the uneasy relationship between two classes.
Vero is pale and blonde. She looks almost from a different race from the darker skinned men and women who serve her throughout the movie – hotel staff, the girl who phones for a taxi and the boy who cleans her car. There is a critique here – the rich can get away with manslaughter – which, by implication, proposes social change.
Martel uses hair colour to represent separation and class difference. Vero’s friends, sitting around a pool but not going into it, refer to the potential damage that chlorine could do to their flowing locks – the implication being that damaged-looking hair lowers your social standing.
Unquestionably taut, The Headless Woman makes a good companion piece to the other current psychological meltdown drama, A Single Man. One scene, in which Vero is in unfamiliar surroundings and turns her car around, is incredibly tense – a mark of great filmmaking as we occupy her headspace.
