La mujer sin cabeza [The Headless Woman] (2008)

In La mujer sin cabeza we watch as a middle class woman named Vero struggles to regain her sense of identity after she hits something with her car on a rural Argentinean road one afternoon. She does not know what she ran over on her way home from a get together—it could have been a dog or a person. She simply drives away after the accident, thereby inducing an odd dreamlike mental state that lasts for days on end following the incident.

I have been waiting with great anticipatory mania for the arrival of this movie, the most recent title by one of my favorite directors of all time, Lucrecia Martel. (She directed one of my favorite films, La ciénaga (2001), which I reviewed as part of my Top Ten off the Top of my Head list a while back.) And I have to say that while I’m not counting on La mujer sin cabeza to replace La ciénaga as one of my all time favorites just yet1, I still feel that it is an incredibly intriguing work because it contains the elements of Martel’s previous works that originally piqued my interest.

Like Martel’s other films, the point of La mujer sin cabeza is not actually the central event driving the rest of the story, but rather the odd, partially obscured details of the protagonist’s life that the ramifications of the central event draw out. As we follow the post-accident Vero wandering through her life in a somnambulistic haze, we catch a glimpse of the many strange and complex relationships surrounding her. We are privy to the unspoken details and whispers of Vero and her husband’s marriage, Vero’s relationship with her lover, Vero and her bedridden, addled mother, and the flirtation between Vero and her niece. Even with the peripheral characters of the film there are references to other ambiguous yet nuanced relationships that Martel hints at but never fully defines.

Indeed, what’s especially good about La mujer sin cabeza is that Martel refuses to offer explanations for many events and conversations, instead referencing the off-screen, the unsaid, the absent. However, rather than creating a void or a lack of meaning with all these question marks, Martel uses double entendre, ambient music, and overheard, half intelligible conversations to prove the existence of that which lies beyond her frame.

In the end Martel is able to say more by saying less, forcing us to focus in on the edges of her story-world, craning our necks to see if we can catch a glimpse of what lies just beyond the borders of the frame. This, for me, is great cinema.

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1. You always have to watch Martel’s work several times over before you can begin to play favorites with characters and stories.