Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

The Head­less Woman, 2008. Directed by Lucre­tia Martel.

“La Mujer Sin Cabeza” is a bril­liant film, with sub­tle social com­men­tary that never hits one over the head. Like the mys­tery in the film itself, it’s some­thing the audi­ence must pieces together. The direc­tor, Lucre­tia Mar­tel, presents the evi­dence, but no edi­to­ri­als. Class and race are para­mount, but they remain as unspo­ken, per­haps even ghostly com­po­nents of the film. Amne­sia, real and feigned, are a part of the mix as well.

Maria Onetto plays Verónica, a bour­geoisie den­tist, liv­ing in com­fort in North­west­ern Argentina. Sur­rounded by a close-​​knit extended fam­ily, in a house where many Indi­genista ser­vants appear and dis­ap­pear, her life takes a sud­den turn when she runs over some­thing on the high­way. She hits her head and becomes dis­ori­ented, but goes on, not look­ing back until much later to see what she may have hit. Was it a dog or a human? We get clues for both pos­si­bil­i­ties as the film pro­gresses, and we dis­cover how quickly her fam­ily pulls together to pro­tect her.

Onetto’s per­for­mance is stun­ning. She is regal in her amne­sia, regal in her con­cus­sion induced vague­ness regard­ing her sur­round­ings. The cam­era work and the sound­track add to the effect and the audi­ence itself is dis­ori­en­tated along with her. But it’s never done with a ham­mer, and always with nuance and lev­els of almost hid­den meaning.

The film made me think as I watched. It made me think about how strange it is that we value one kind of work over another kind. In the movie, it appears that young and older Indi­genistas are con­stantly in motion, work­ing hard, mov­ing across the screen, ask­ing for work again and again, while the Argen­tini­ans of Euro­pean ances­try seem to have a great deal of leisure time. The Indi­genistas work harder because they are paid far less for their work. They must do more of it because their wages are so ter­ri­ble in rel­a­tive terms. As I watched, I won­dered about the sur­re­al­ity of our own sys­tem here, how CEOs make 500 times more than rank and file work­ers, when they made just 43 times as much 30 years ago. Why should they pay them­selves so much more? Are they really worth 500 work­ers? Do they really do the work of 500 peo­ple, and do they really have a skill worth 500 times more than the aver­age Joe or Jane? Why is their work val­ued at such an incred­i­ble rate?

Again, Mar­tel never dis­cusses these things. Her char­ac­ters never dis­cuss these things. Her film, though, is a demon­stra­tion of the ridicu­lous nature of our class divi­sions and the insane divide between rich and poor. Not know­ing Argen­tin­ian his­tory, this was my take­away, though other crit­ics have pointed to many other sym­bolic and metaphor­i­cal con­nec­tions with recent Argen­tin­ian tur­moil and dic­ta­tor­ship. They have pointed to the aspect of her fam­ily clos­ing ranks to pro­tect Verónica from the reper­cus­sions of her acci­dent, and some of the very brief scenes, almost too brief to catch, of pos­si­ble inces­tu­ous rela­tion­ships in her fam­ily. This, too, along with her amne­sia, points to social change and the walls between the classes. But Mar­tel does some­thing fair and just in another sense. The Indi­genistas seem pow­er­ful in their own way. They don’t seem afraid of the Mid­dle Class, nor par­tic­u­larly impressed by them. While they are treated unfairly over­all, they are never owned.

This is a thought-​​provoking movie that deserves wide expo­sure, and calls for more than one viewing.