She pauses, hovering between possibilities, before smoothing down her hair with her red lacquered nails and revving up the 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. When her phone rings, she looks down, and in that moment hits something with her car. She’s peroxide blonde and in sunglasses, the picture of glamour against a dirt road. In The Headless Woman, the thread begins here: Véro (Maria Onetto), a wealthy white woman, drives home after a big family gathering. How do you read a story that has the density of a long exposure photograph, all traces visible but dizzying in their heavy simultaneity?Īs 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.

Even so, her narration retains its layered form and sly accumulations. 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. 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. Habitually, we defer to the ordinary illuminations of chronology and its ways of streamlining through omission. 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.

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.

La mujer sin cabeza torrent