Fragments of Lucrecia Martel’s ‘The Headless Woman’ (‘La mujer sin cabeza’, 2008)

1.

In Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza, 2008), the protagonist bears her guilt so singularly you almost wish it were contagious. What might history look like if guilty minds unspooled en masse? Collective memory allows only so much deviation from its central narratives; the rest is marginalia by a different hand. Habitually, we defer to the ordinary illuminations of chronology and its ways of streamlining through omission. But Martel’s films feel otherwise: characters move in the foreground, midground and background, askance in the frame; entire stories unfold right next to each other, one silent and the other sharp with sound. Unlike La Ciénaga (2001) and The Holy Girl (La niña santa, 2004), both also set in the peripheral province of Salta in northwestern Argentina, The Headless Woman sees Martel focus on a central character for the first time. Even so, her narration retains its layered form and sly accumulations. How do you read a story that has the density of a long exposure photograph, all traces visible but dizzying in their heavy simultaneity?

As far as individual culpability goes, guilt requires the narrative coherence of a perpetrator conscious of their wrongdoing, or at least a thread along which the events can be traced. In The Headless Woman, the thread begins here: Véro (Maria Onetto), a wealthy white woman, drives home after a big family gathering. She’s peroxide blonde and in sunglasses, the picture of glamour against a dirt road. When her phone rings, she looks down, and in that moment hits something with her car. A dog, or one of the indigenous boys seen playing by the road in the opening shot? The rear-view mirror suggests the former, but Véro has her own suspicions. She pauses, hovering between possibilities, before smoothing down her hair with her red lacquered nails and revving up the car.

Véro comes to us with her head on, not a woman made weary by her off-screen past, but one who we see decapitated in full view, teetering towards chaos and navigating shakier and shakier ground. The film mirrors her concussive state, more intermittent incursions of panic than a Lady Macbeth-style plummet into self-annihilating guilt. There is no one to corroborate her suspicions, never mind the possibility of a homicide, and her family is eager to forget the incident entirely. Her routines are insistently re-established – is she hungry? No, but a sandwich is somehow still delivered to her hotel room. Does she need a morning coffee? Her husband does, so she should make some. More damningly – does she need someone to call her a cab? Where did she park hers? That weekend, a fierce storm shakes the city and the rains wash down in a cosmic allegory. These bloodstained hands rinse too easily; the drama does not lie in their indelible mnemonics, but in the retroactive thrills of remembering the crime at all.

2.

Our understanding of history is bound with the forms of its narration, and narrative itself, as Hayden White writes, is the difficulty of translating knowing into telling.^[i] Martel’s films are heavy with knowing, but oblique with what they tell: they know how national trauma can dissolve into a fugue state; how Argentina’s junta-era los desaparecidos were a blind spot for people of a certain class; how the brown bodies of those who wash cars, fetch water, prepare meals, and deliver ornamental pots to households with elaborate gardening ambitions are implicated in a stretch of violence born over some five centuries ago, when Spain sailed over to steal life and land carte blanche.^[ii] She tells, but without the centring function of plot – where early Argentine cinema post-1983 (see Luis Puenzo’s 1985 award-winner The Official Story) tended to narratively centre the erased past in a gesture of belated mourning and consecration, Martel centres an affect of disorientation.

Throughout her work, Martel defers to the camera’s capacity for simultaneity to complicate our focus. Soon after the hit and run in The Headless Woman, Véro freshens up in a hospital bathroom, the camera focused on her reflection in a mid-shot. In the background, two uniformed women coerce a third out of a cubicle to arrest her for something unspecified. Although we never see her front on, straight black hair and the glimpse of a brown face in profile speak volumes against Véro’s pale blonde mane. In a later scene, rain beats against a window in Véro’s home. The only figure in the shot is an anonymous woman, crouched over, assembling something on the floor. Véro’s husband moves into the frame and announces a relative’s arrival, seemingly addressing the woman. But then Véro, until now totally unseen, rises up from the floor, half-clad, as the woman remains crouched, helping her dress. Her husband continues their conversation while the woman moves silently in the background, never acknowledged.

Everyone and everything accommodates Véro. In a rare moment of outright weeping, Véro seeks refuge in another public bathroom. She approaches a serviceman at work (brown, of course) and declares curtly, with no introduction, “There’s no water”. He immediately sets down his tools and comforts her, returning later with a bottle of water. As she prepares to leave, Véro slips her sunglasses back on and wishes him a good afternoon from behind their tinted barricades. Martel consistently reminds us that these (mostly white) on-screen figures can’t escape their social and bodily interdependence, that they rely on countless others to exist the way they do. Ubiquitous brownness tells by contrast, too. Where Martel’s frames are fraught with superimposed action, the glaring blanks between shots see the film play out like a psychological thriller. Véro first confesses her possible crime in the middle of a crowded shopping mall. In a throwaway voice, she turns to her husband: “I killed someone on the road”. When the two retrace her path along the road at night, they see the body of a dog from the safety of their car. “It’s a dog!” her husband cries in relief, “You got scared. It’s ok”. Véro remains unconvinced, though she now qualifies her claim: “I think I killed someone”. Later, the body of young boy washes up in the now-flooded canal that runs parallel to the road.

Prior details take on a second life as clues – a misty handprint on a car window; a heart-wrenching thump (or thumps?) on the road. The impulse to read them thus – as tricks that point toward some narrative end – is fired by an appetite for knowing and its attendant certainties. But Martel only cares about the consequences of perceived truth: these are more urgent for her than establishing any state of actual veracity. That Véro believes in the homicide is truth enough for a damning contrast: her amnesiac narrative runs alongside the unequivocally present and perceptible bodies that fold clothes in the bedroom, help lazy arms into sleeves, console in public bathrooms, garden under the hot sun. We see what we see: bodies that happened – are happening – but no one is interested in figuring them out. Mystery tantalises with all sorts of possibility, but truths in plain sight refuse the satisfaction of cunning discovery. In their silent visibility, these bodies remind us that the questions we try so hard to address can be answered in ways we fail to reckon with.

3.

In Martel’s hands, the simultaneous image becomes a disrupted, heterogeneous present. “A lot of times I would stare at one fixed place and simply watch all the characters’ movements. But sometimes I would switch to another person, and another, and it would go on building like that,” she told BOMB magazine.^[iii] Véro may be the film’s core, but she figures in an ensemble cast of the decaying bourgeoisie, locked in provincial life, flung far from the urban pace of Buenos Aires. What happens to a central performance that has to share its moments? Véro’s guilt is her own, but the weight of its expression seems diffused by the smooth denials of her middle class entourage. Maria Onetto plays Véro’s paranoia with restraint, all downcast looks and rapid-fire blinking, as though the facts can be reset with a disavowing flutter of the eyes. She rarely speaks, and brackets her silence with the kind of sighing that usually preempts a barrage of frustration. Here, it never actually comes. Véro has few moments of intelligible upset: in one scene, she watches a boy double over from a sporting injury, sandy from the grit of a baseball field (or a stretch of dry road?). She runs into a bathroom and sobs.

In profile, the peroxide bounce of Onetto’s hair calls to mind that other blonde-framed face of renowned neuroses – Gena Rowlands in her turns as Mabel Longhetti in John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and as Myrtle Gordon in Opening Night (1977). The former role sees Rowlands buckle under an untenable mix of suburban ennui and wife-mother drudgery, and the latter, as an actress who fears being too good at her job, too convincing at playing a character much older than herself. Myrtle spends most of the film being haunted by a beautiful dead fan, who we see run over while chasing after her car on opening night. From the outside, her visions read like symptoms of something dire. Where Véro’s family intervenes by encouraging erasure, Myrtle’s friends look the problem square in the eye – one takes her to a spiritualist in New York where they attempt a séance, and others just yell. Myrtle’s deterioration is readable, etched into the tiny machinations of Rowlands’s face, traced by her wild gestures. Only her hair never moves, at least until her drunken stumbling in the finale: light blonde bob waved and set stiff against the sugar pink of her animated mouth.

Myrtle bares her feelings to a camera that sees only her, so we can take her expressions for granted. But Véro withholds, her emotions thoroughly internalised and often elided through Martel’s more democratic camera and unconventional cuts. In her analysis of Raymond Williams’s seminal work on the “structure of feeling”, Lauren Berlant examines the possibilities of underperformed emotion. Ordinarily, emotional intelligibility in social situations relies on the transparency of performance. Berlant argues that underperformed – or “flat” – gestures inhibit immediate comprehension, and force us to reorient our understanding of cause and effect in the present. When Véro picks up a newspaper as her gardener toils under the sun, does her brow furrow lightly in the daytime glare, or is it with the confrontation of something she has read? It is, as Berlant writes, a matter of resisting “an impulse to overread the body that is unforthcoming, while maintaining attention to the multiple forces expressed through that body”.^[iv] What is intelligible – narratively coherent, emotionally forthcoming – glosses over the fact of a fractured present.

4.

The past nudges its way into every frame. As Martel told Film Comment: “the accident is present in every scene in different forms: maybe there is somebody who is digging, or something that is thrown on the floor”.^[v] These frames are haunted, as Véro is, with a creeping ambiguity. Her guilt is bound with a need to mourn – how many ghosts stick around for want of attention? There is a purgatory for those who fear being forgotten in death, just as in life. Véro is caught in an unfinishable narrative of mourning – the object of her grief is uncertain, spectral, and only fades faster as the incident recedes. “If we can be haunted”, writes Judith Butler in Frames of War, “then we can acknowledge that there has been a loss and hence that there has been a life”.^[vi] A loss that matters instantiates grief, and the grievability of a life is commensurate with its humanity. If this is a life that can and will be grieved, we will institute certain measures to prevent its loss. But a brown boy and his dog on a dirt road? Communities without the resources to guard against environmental havoc? “This storm has hurt thousands of people”, announces Véro’s sister, at her son’s birthday party, a remark so incongruous it sounds like a non-sequitur, sandwiched as it is between party banalities. Where are these hurt thousands? The storm happens yearly; these losses are signalled, but their actuality is relegated to the easy elsewhere.

These details that feel like intrusions – faces we never notice, sounds that shouldn’t be heard, things that shouldn’t be said – defamiliarise scenes of ordinary family life. “When I look through the camera,” Martel says, “I feel that there is something about to be revealed and [it] is actually not what I am seeing”, a revelatory instinct that suffuses all of her work. James Quandt has remarked on her simultaneous status as one of cinema’s Controllers and Intuitionists – for all the meticulous framing in her tiered mise-en-scène, something ineffable like instinct seems to have the final say, the camera’s autonomous kino-eye revealing the otherwise unspeakable.^[vii] Only the bedbound matriarch, known as ‘Lala’, seems to echo this preternatural gaze. Her memory is patchy with dementia, but sometimes her slip-ups sound more like eerie revelations than throwaway inconsistencies. We first meet her surrounded by family, rewatching old VHS footage of her daughter’s wedding. They reminiscence together, jovial and warm – Lala even cracks a few jokes. But something shifts as Véro fast-forwards through the footage, sounds warping with the quickened movement of time. “It’s Genoveva!” Lala shouts, grabbing the remote and pointing. She lowers her voice – “Genoveva had already died. Genoveva was already dead”. Later, Véro sits by her bed as she lies curled on her side. “Who is it?” Lala asks, but when Véro responds, her voice goes unrecognised. A strange sound creeps in – like beads falling to the floor, or the harsh ripple of static – startling in the bedroom stillness. “Don’t look at him,” Lala whispers, eyes closed, “the house is full of them.” The camera rests on Véro’s profile, her face inscrutable. Lala’s voice carries from off-screen: “The dead. They’re leaving now.” As if conjured by sheer force of superstition, a small boy rises into the frame, unfocused in the background. He turns to look at Véro, his figure so vague as to be a silhouette, and leaves the room.

Martel defers narrative authorship to a camera that straddles layers of the real, which, for her, is the fantastical. Instead of magic realist intrusions into the mundane, there is a sustained uncanny that cohabits with the present.^[viii] Even if Véro is unable to feel out the shape of her mourning, to narrativise it, she wanders incriminated. After all, Martel’s meandering camera has testified: her frames conjure visitors from the past, from the margins of memory both singular and collective. After yet another family gathering, we see a relative set down a glass of water in a now-empty kitchen. As she leaves, a small brown boy enters the frame and drinks it, though it’s clear he has always been in the room, somewhere off-screen. This uncanny coming-to is a whispered accusation: these bodies may enter a frame, or our line of vision during screen-time, but they never enter a room. Where are we looking? They are always already there.

^[i] Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7 No. 1, Autumn 1980, p5 ^[ii] Martel’s latest, Zama (2018),  looks at this in dazzling detail. ^[iii] Interview: Lucrecia Martel by Hayden Guest for BOMB Magazine, January 2009, (Online). ^[iv] Lauren Berlant, ‘Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 28, 2015, p195. ^[v] Interview: Lucrecia Martel by José Teodoro, Film Comment, September 2017, (Online). ^[vi] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, (London:Verso, 2009), p98. ^[vii] James Quandt, ‘Art of Fugue’, Artforum, Summer 2009, (Online). ^[viii] Interview: Lucrecia Martel, BOMB Magazine.