La niña santa

I'm in general not a fan of Spanish-language cinema, for the same reason that I don't care for Russian classical music; it's usually overheated and unsubtle, telegraphing emotions like Yiddish theater. For every hypnotic or erotic sequence in Almodovar, there's another that's just juvenile and sub-Freudian ( like the little man crawling into the woman's privates in Talk to Her. ) Even Luis Bunuel had moments where the rigor slackens and he seems to say, "Aw, I'll just wing it."

Well, the rigor never slackens in The Holy Girl. This film would make Maurice Pialat feel like he was wearing a neck brace. Lucrecia Martel makes so few concessions in her film-making that even the most advanced and cosmopolitan film buffs will be bewildered by the effort of comprehension they're faced with here ( as they always will be when confronted with the spiritual, by the way. ) Martel, to her credit, is completely immune to any trends in Spanish-language, not to say Argentinian film-making, and doesn't truckle to any stereotypes about hot-blooded Latins either. This film is as cold-blooded, analytical and lofty as they come. She has been compared to Claire Denis, but she's much more like the aforementioned Pialat, structuring her film in "blocks," so that each scene starts in media res, making us readjust and grapple for our bearings. From Cassavetes she has also learned a lot, especially the way every single shot is filled with peripheral, incidental characters who appear and disappear at random, but who contribute a steady stream of ambient chatter and small talk that Martel uses as white noise to bury the important dialogue. This sharpens the audience's attention and makes them search each and every frame for the aural and visual clues they'll need to penetrate the symbolic thicket.

I'll admit that my primal instinct is to gush unreservedly over such brazen world-cinema ambitions, but in this case, there was something missing, some sense of spontaneity or original flair. Is it that I've seen too many art-movies that construct a pasteboard purgatory and try to make the audience and the filmmaker complicit in a feeling of superiority over and above the struggling souls depicted? There's a rush of symbols in this film -- the Theremin, the theatrical presentation, the temperature-controlled pool, the spritzes of air freshener, and many more -- that point to Martel's concern with the way people fake their own lives, or what they consider to be pleasures. But, perhaps due to the late date of 2005, 40-odd years on from the premiere of L'Avenntura at Cannes, this feels like a preestablished "theme" rather than an obsession. The jouissance-as-limbo framework, in fact, is really nothing at this date but shorthand for film festival quality that every self-respecting intellecto is supposed to automatically scratch their chins and snap their fingers about. And The Holy Girl is missing the distinctive personal feature that would put it over the top, whether it's the sky-high cringe factor of Dumont's 29 Palms, or the the male-gaze Lolita lust of Pialat's A Nos Amours. This film by contrast reminds me of certain dry-as-dust female professors I've had who pick over the corpse of To The Lighthouse but seem not to really be impassioned by it or anything else.

Then again, why am I insisting that a movie that's about passion has to be made with passion? I'm contradicting myself. Amalia, the titular holy girl, who we see masturbating and chasing after an older man, is not a real nymphet but actually much more like one of those female saints you read about who, racked with tumors, relish each moment of pain for the way it brings them closer to God. The catch is that, in this case, it's Amalia's puberty that serves as the tumor. What looks like the erotic raptures of a budding adolescent are actually paeans to God, who she sees as having sent her on a mission to save Dr. Janos from himself -- she conflates this feeling of the religious "purpose-driven life" with her own pubertal longings. But Martel makes sure to render her unclassifiable, immune from definitions, from psychology, even from humanity. She is, simply put, a non-sexual being ( I was about to say "defiantly non-sexual being" but she doesn't need to defy anyone, she is passively what she is, a glimmer of truth in a hive of fear and desperation. ) If Amalia directed this movie, it would be with exactly the same kind of disorienting, intensely-focused calm punctuated by fleeting mystical signs -- a testament to Martel's success, despite my reservations.

Lucrecia Martel is one gifted artist. Her latest film, 'La Niña santa' (The Holy Girl) was conceived, written and directed in a style that is a tough and puzzling of Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar: what you see on the screen is an enigmatic mixture of sexuality and spirituality, comedy and drama, polemics and parody, all woven together in a fascinatingly beautiful story that demands a lot from the audience. Martel is a talent of enormous potential and magnitude.

In a somewhat seedy hotel somewhere in Argentina (? Buenos Aires,? Rosario) lives divorced party planner Helena (a brilliant Mercedes Morán), her also divorced brother Freddy (Alejandro Urdapilleta), and her teenage daughter Amalia (María Alche). Amalia goes to parochial school with her friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) and there they study Catholic life and the need for a 'vocation'. Both girls are caught up in the throes of adolescent sexual awakening and committed spiritual development, with the loggerheads the two themes can produce. Josefina is having safe sex (ie anal sex) while demanding that her perpetrator not speak during the act. Amalia finds a different encounter.

In the hotel is a convention of doctors, among them one Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso) who, though married with children, has a secretive act of pressing himself against the buttocks of young girls (an act of molestation), and while listening to a street Thermin player, he rubs against Amalia. Amalia becomes obsessed with the act and its possible permutations and finally decides that this man's redemption is her 'vocation'. While she confides the incidents to Josefina, she otherwise keeps her secret.

Meanwhile Helena is monitoring the doctors' convention and meets Dr Jano, is attracted to him, and agrees to be an 'actress' for a convention closing drama on doctor/patient relationships. Dr Jano is invited to Helena's room where of course he meets the stalking Amalia, and the tension of the multiple innuendos mounts. Dr Jano's family arrives at the convention dousing Helena's hopes for a assignation, but encouraging Amalia to corner Jano to reassure him he is a good man (ie, she provides his redemption - her 'vocation' commitment for her spiritual training). How this plays out in the end provides the food for post-film thought and is best left for the viewer to see.

Martel's technique for drawing characters is unique and extraordinary, made all the stronger from her carefully selected cast of top-flight actors (many of whom she has used in prior projects, 'La Cienega' etc). Her camera designs (fulfilled by cinematographer Félix Monti) and her wondrous emphasis on sound (including original music by Andres Gerzenson as well as repeated use of Thermin reproduction of music by Bach and Bizet) give her film a special look that is becoming her trademark.

Her executive producer is Pedro Almodóvar which should tell the audience a lot about the importance of this film. Lucrecia Martel creates difficult, highly intelligent, at times meandering, but always fascinating movies. She is a budding giant in the industry. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp

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.

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.

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.