I suppose every human being has had something in their lives to instill guilt, ranging greatly over a vast spectrum of severity. Such severity often determines the depth and duration of one’s guilt. Having stolen a piece of candy as a child would naturally be short-lived while causing another person permanent damage would likely weigh much heavier on that person’s conscience. Having been the cause of something to die is clearly amongst the worst guilt a person could endure. Imagine for a moment that you have taken a life, but to what or whom that life belonged you are not certain.
This is the experience the audience is engaged in with ‘The Headless Woman’ (La mujer sin cabeza). This Argentinian film was written and directed by Lucrecia Martel and stars Maria Onetta as Veronica, a middle-aged woman affectionately known to her family and friends as Vero. Driving home by herself, she hits something in the road. Vero believes she heard a dog yelp, but finds herself terribly frightened of what she might find if she were to return to the scene. Vero, clearly disturbed by what has happened, chooses to continue home rather than reveal the truth to herself.
The opening scenes of ‘The Headless Woman’ introduces the audience to Vero’s questionable psychological state of mind, but takes some time to reveal the underlying cause of her distress. We witness the accident very early on, but at first it seems to be the result of some deeper root cause for her mental state. At first, I found myself wondering if Vero was suffering some early onset stage of Alzheimer’s, but this misdirection eventually passed. Vero’s actions and her frequency to appear oblivious to the world and events around her present an interesting element of mystery to her character.
Vero is a member of a good-sized family of class who care for her, but mostly dismiss her concern and continually reinforce the insignificance of what occurred and attempt to prove it was merely a dog. For Vero, the experience is not that simple to cut herself loose of and finds she is alone in carrying this burden. She finds herself surrounded by children, constantly reminded of the possibility of what she might have done. Once Vero does finally break down and cry for the first time, she does so with a complete stranger.
One of the most intriguing aspects of ‘The Headless Woman’ is Martel’s use of space. The framing and staging of the film emphasizes Vero’s sense of uneasy solitude, forced to deal with the unknown reality of her own actions despite having people around her at all times. During her interactions with others, Vero rarely faces the others and stands removed from the action, but always remains in the foreground. This, combined with a masterful use of racked focus and Vero’s lack of eye contact with others, creates an effect of separating Vero from the rest of the world and allows us a front row seat to her inner conflict of emotions.
The concept of ‘The Headless Woman’ is great, taking something as philosophically complex as guilt and translating it visually on screen, but suffers from an otherwise tedious lack of substance outside of Vero’s mind. The film tends to get bogged down in it’s own pace and can become a bit draining at times. However, this is not entirely a fault to the overall effect the film is intended to have on the viewer. A turn of events is revealed in the final third of the film that presents the opportunity for interpretation of Vero’s feeling of guilt.
In the end, Vero dyes her hair from blonde to black, as if to reinvent herself in an attempt to start over and perhaps even redeem herself for what may have happened. Throughout the film, Vero shuffles between wearing two masks. One false mask of relative peace is for her family and friends while the other mask of sadness is her true face.’The Headless Woman’ is a study of the human psyche, a glimpse inside the rugged terrain of guilt and uncertainty that requires more than casual viewing, but isn’t mired in complicated plot devices.
