La fille sainte

Lucrecia Martel, the director of "The Holy Girl" gives us an erotically charged account of a young woman's awakening to a world that she seems not to be ready for. Ms. Martel combines a mixture of religion and eroticism in the narrative of the film. As always, the director gathers an interesting cast to tell her story.

It's interesting to read some of the negative comments to this forum. Most perceive the film as boring and slow. In fact, the film is far from that, and it was surprising to see the movie the other day at the Lincoln Plaza complex with a theater half full and nobody walked out of the film, something that we have witnessed viewers to do with other, more acclaimed features.

Ms. Martel takes us to a remote spot in Northern Argentina, an improbable place for holding a medical convention. At the same time, the director, in an interview we read, tells about how the location, which she knew from having been as a guest, made an impression on her and she based her story at the hotel.

Amalia is a young girl that is just awakening to a sexuality that goes against her upbringing. We see her surrounded by her school mates and the loyal Josefina, her best friend. Ines, who seems older, leads the group in prayer, perhaps to get the young women's mind into their latent sexual awakenings. Amalia lives in the hotel with her mother, an attractive woman who seems to be oblivious to what's going on with her daughter. In fact, one gets the impression the mother enjoys whatever sex she gets to the fullest.

Enter the roguish Dr. Jano. He is on his own, attending the medical conference, although he is married and has about four children. When Dr. Jano goes into town he spots a group watching a street performance and immediately gravitates toward the beautiful young woman he sees as someone he can casually rub himself against the girl without attracting attention. Amalia realizes what's going on and starts following this enigmatic man, who proves to be elusive in the open. He is more of a voyeur rather than a man that would lead Amalia into an open sexual encounter. Everything is done in a subtle way, which in a way works better because of the shock it provokes on the viewer. In a way, Ms. Martel makes us voyeurs because through her camera, she makes us watch what Dr. Jano is doing to Amalia.

The acting Ms. Martel got from the principals is amazing. Maria Alche is a girl of great beauty. She is an intense young woman who fits perfectly in the story. The other good performance comes from Carlos Belloso. His Dr. Jano is an enigma as we watch him. In a way it shows this man as a duplicitous person who being married, will go and try to get his thrills in dark places, probably sitting next to unsuspecting young women in movies, or wherever he can be aroused without being obvious. Mia Maestro is Ines, the pious woman who is seen giving religious instruction to the girls. Julieta Zyberberg is good as Josefina and Mercedes Moran also has great moments as Helena.

This is a disturbing film, but one that dares to speak of things that other film makers avoid. Ms. Martel shows she is a director that doesn't mind taking chances.

As far as I'm concerned, the film is an outstanding achievement in cinematic narrative, I'm tentatively including it as one of the very best I have seen. A lot of viewers have complained about the slumbering, monotonous tone and the filmmaker's insistence to not explain her vague story, which capped off by the high-handed gesture of the ending—the only note off for me—can give the impression that this is another in a long list of 'artsy', fashionably minimal film festival fodder.

Fair points, but consider something else.

The story is fairly simple, a Catholic girl looks to save the soul of a middle- aged doctor.

I'm not sure if Lolita was consciously the template, indeed the film differs in obvious ways—the doctor makes covert sexual advances, but he is a sincerely troubled man, and from her end the girl perceives these to be a sign from god that this man has strayed and needs saving. There is family dysfunction as background and a lot of religious talk on the divine plan. But there is something deeper Lolitaesque, more in a while.

Okay so the basic means of expression are in Altman's mode of narrative drifting, but with the difference of a static camera and the drift carried through in the movement of bodies and sound. If you read up on what the filmmaker has to say, she reveals stumbling on to this in an interesting way, not via film school but intimate observations of family. She seems like an alert, curious mind who likes to observe, the basis of everything.

The film begins in a shapeless, rumbling state, and only gradually establishes a few things; the place is a hotel, a doctors' convention is scheduled to take place, the man is married with kids, the girl's mother is divorced. It only begins to acquire shape when both the girl and her mother take an interest in the sullen man. Ordinary so far.

Here's where it gets really cool.

The notion is that there is a a sign which female intuition picks up, the sign kicks off a story of connection, but for obvious reasons the story cannot be consummated in the open, it has to be submerged, disguised for busy, prying eyes. (the hotel residents' as well as our own)

But now look at all these different things going on. A man in the shop window who creates invisible sounds and draws a crowd enthralled at the mystery of his creation, the remote sounds of hunters' gunfire which alarm the girl in the woods to something horrible, the talk of an invisible godvoice, the mother's unexplained persistent earbuzz. Both the mother and the doctor have acted in plays (the doctor as a doctor!), and a doctor- patient re-enactment before an audience is proposed to the mother by the taciturn doctor. And the most revealing, another doctor is caught in mischief with a young girl, which foreshadows shame and public embarrassment.

The core scene that perfectly encapsulates what this is all about, is when we discover how the man in the shop window has been producing his peculiar sounds—a theremin, calligraphic hands drawing from thin air the shape of sound, something out of nothing, which is a stunning metaphor for the urges that overtake us in life.

So as characters move through the world, they draw illusory currents in the air which on the topmost level acquire dramatic shape that reveals soul. It is this that masterfully recalls Lolita and in a far deeper way than either of the two film adaptations—a story which is both the story and faintly reveals the haze of urges (sexual, spiritual) of hidden inner selves as they shift and shiver behind their acceptable roles in that story.

Each of these things amazes. I was in awe of a few.

Together, they suggest one of the brightest, most intelligent voices in film these days, one of perhaps only three working right now for me. What's keeping her back? For my taste, the unoriginal camera. She just hasn't yet discovered her own calligraphic eye that will set her apart, though I'm sure that is in her future. For all I know, she has found it in her next film.

I wish her the best of luck. In the meantime, see this and contemplate on the rich tapestry she has woven.

Director and co-writer, Lucrecia Martel (Argentina, 1966), has certainly re-written the Lolita story. But this time, the older male finds a more complex younger female in his way. The world is small and certainly claustrophobic, mainly a hotel with mineral baths somewhere in the Santiago del Estero region in Argentina called Las Termas. Tourists come and go into this hotel where all employees form a kind of extended family. Amalia, played by María Alché,is a 15 year-old immersed in the study of catechism and sexual awakening. The great question becomes that of vocation, "what does God wishes me to do." Dr. Jano, played by Carlos Belloso, attends a professional medical conference at Las Termas and engages in improper sexual conduct in a public street of the small town. Once discovered by Amalia, his remorse grows as things become more and more entangled. Amalia and Dr. Jano engage in a mesmerizing game of hide and seek, of desire to redeem and fear of the consequences of losing anonymity.

La niña santa is a haunting film, beautifully shot and full of complex nuances as well as tension. It left me with a sense of "what happened here?" Regarding its director, Pedro Almodovar (one of the film's executive producers) as said that she knows is part of his list of favorite film directors. Perhaps he sees in Martel's work the subtleties that he himself lacks.

I lack words to express how impressed I was with Argentina's "La Niña Santa". It's easily of one of the best South American films in recent history, along with "City of God" and "Amores Perros".

The film follows a very simple plot: an attractive single mother lives in a hotel with her teenage daughter, and they are currently having many guests over for a science committee. Among the guests is Doctor Jano, a reserved and mysterious middle-aged man.

The film then proceeds to analyze and dissect the relationship between the three in an incredibly haunting and uncompromising manner. Seldom can a moviegoer be treated to such exquisite work in writing, cinematography and acting as with "La Niña Santa".

In addition to that, the relationship between the two teenage girls, Amalia and Josefina is one of the most realistic and beautiful portrays of adolescent life I have ever seen.

Simply the greatest film of 2004 and one of the best of this decade so far.

More admirable than attractive is Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl" – even at this time I am feeling a steady amount of ambivalence toward this maddeningly beautiful film. Is this kind of paradoxical relationship even possible? Even the proverbial sinner in his love/hate toward expiation seems dubious.

The film follows Amalia and her friend Josefina's exploits as they navigate their way through a summer of adolescence. Sanctimonious doesn't even begin to describe them – indeed, Amalia is wanting to screw a man she's trying to "save" while Josefina regards her Catholic school teacher with disdain due to the good teacher's sexual adventures even though Josefina herself takes it up the arse from her horny boyfriend. This shopworn irony regarding the duality and dialectical impulses in hormonal, affectedly pious people grows wearisome on the attention span.

Okay, but I used the adjective "beautiful" earlier. And it most certainly is from a logistical standpoint. The DP composed seemingly interminable, achingly gorgeous shots of the action. He had no qualms about not using deep-focus photography (in which everything in the frame is in focus). This style harks back to the old American B&W's in which they were not afraid to focus on only one piece of the frame while leaving the rest in a blurry discombobulation. A power erupts from the screen the more pronounced these shots are. However, it must be said, the steady frequency of all this becomes stultifying to an annoying degree – like chocolate in endless supply, it becomes too much of a good thing.

This cloying film would have been great if it didn't try so hard to be a great film. Art house flicks mostly subscribe to an overly snobby and abundantly complex ideological schema. Is a show-off praiseworthy? Not in this case.