The reproof that you never quite know what Vero hit on the road simply means that you're not paying enough attention. The movie does a great job of suggesting what happened, from the time we see the child's hand print on the window, immediately following the accident, until the very end. Each frame of the film becomes subject for investigation...a space for the director to bury her clues. One simply has to play the part of the detective. You'll see that there is a perfectly straightforward explanation to everything that happens in this film and the incident is eventually wrapped up rather neatly by the end. This is my abridged version...Vero hits both a dog and a boy on the road. The dog lays dead on the road while the boy falls to the (then) dry canal. Five minutes after the accident it starts to rain. It rains all weekend and the canal fills up with water. The body of the boy has begun to move, drifting away with the current of the canal. This is why when Vero tells her husband that she killed someone on the road and they go back to look for the body, they only find the dead dog. Also, she is informed that there have been no reports of an accident on that road. Vero seems to be getting over the incident and to believe that she may have been mistaken after all. "It was nothing
" she tells her nephew's friend. When they go buy the pots for the plants for the first time, however, things begin to change. First, the man who sells the pots tells Vero that there is a boy who hasn't been coming to work. And then, on the drive back they see the firemen trying to get something out of the canal - it is the boy's body that Vero hit on the road. Vero's husband, cousin and brother get together and cover the whole thing up, destroying all evidence - getting the car repaired, removing documents from the hospital and the hotel. The newspapers say the boy drowned
Vero knows otherwise but you can see how she tries to convince herself of the lie over and over again. This is a film about ghosts - and the madness of blocking out the truth and placing a lie in its place. The water and the canal act as a beautiful metaphor for the way that our mind moves undesirable truths to the back of the head and tries to keep them there from surfacing. Vero seems to finally find a way to cope with the incident by changing her hair color, as though she could find some vindication in bringing her look a notch closer to the native population. "I did it myself" she tells her cousin's wife. "Oh, you're brave!" she responds. Both women react to the subtext - Vero is a coward and everyone knows about what happened. Yet everyone is willing to keep it under the surface, unspoken, and in their passivity the entire clan has become her accomplice. When Vero goes through the crystal doors in the end and into the room where they're holding a party, she seems to be walking into a space suspended from ordinary reality, with its own set of rules and alliances. The disappearance of bodies and their cover-up is a very preponderant aspect of Argentine history and here plays itself out through a more banal situation. Yet what's really fruitful in Martel's conceit is that by placing her main character in a state of complete disorientation, we perceive the strangeness of her quotidian reality along with her. Suddenly, small, insignificant, daily exchanges between different class members come to the fore with all their anachronism, strangeness and violence.
Review of The Headless Woman
