A Menina Santa

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.

The combination of budding adolescent sexuality and Catholic Sunday School sermonizing leads to confusion and trouble in Lucrecia Martel's remarkable second film The Holy Girl. Similar in style to Alain Cavalier's masterful Thérése, another film about religious fervor, The Holy Girl is an extremely intimate series of minimalist vignettes in which the story unfolds in glimpses and whispered conversations, in "a slow reverie of quick moments". As in Thérése, there is no approval or disapproval of behavior, only a snapshot of events that the viewer is left to interpret -- and it can be a challenge.

Set in La Salta, the same small Northern Argentine town as Martel's first feature La Ciénaga, the film takes place at a run down hotel that is hosting a medical convention of ear, nose, and throat doctors. The scene is a constant flux of people and movement and it is difficult at first to sort out the characters. Amalia (Maria Alché) is the sixteen-year old daughter of the hotel's manager Helena (Mercedes Moran) who is recently divorced and lives with her brother Freddy (Alejandro Urdapilleta). Helena suffers from an inner ear problem that is reflected in a discordant ringing noise that affects her relationship with the world around her.

As the film opens, Inés (Mia Maestro), a young Catholic teacher leads a group of girls in choir practice. "What is it, Lord, you want of me?" she sings. Overcome with emotion, tears well up in her eyes but Amalia and her friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) merely whisper to each other about the teacher's alleged love affairs. The talk in class is about the student's "mission" and how they can recognize the signs that point to God's calling. Amalia thinks she sees a sign when a doctor attending the conference, Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso) goes in for some sexual touching while she stands in a group listening to a performance on the Theremin, an instrument that is not touched, but is played by disturbing the surrounding air (perhaps the way adults ought to deal with adolescents).

The character's motivations are complex and defy easy categorizing. Jano is a family man with children but seems driven by sexual longings. Helena, still seething that her ex-husband has just fathered twins by his new wife, is attracted to Jano but her advances are not reciprocated and her relationship with Freddy has a hint of more than brotherly love. Josefina teases her young cousin but holds back from committing herself, yet fully engages in kissing with Amalia, though what it means to them is uncertain. Amalia thinks that her mission is to save Dr. Jano and seductively follows him around the hotel, even entering his room when he is not there. At first not relating Amalia's stalking to the incident in the crowd, Jano becomes fearful that his medical career will be jeopardized when he discovers her identity, but the die is cast and Amalia's casual relating the incident to Josefina leads to unintended results.

The Holy Girl is elusive and somewhat disorienting, yet it remains an extraordinary achievement, full of intensity and crackling tension, true to the way people act when they are dealing with feelings bubbling beneath the surface. The girls live in their own little world, oblivious to the havoc they have unleashed and it is Martel's brilliant direction that allows us to enter that world, and it is not always comfortable. What happens in the film may be inappropriate but it never seems perverse. We expect the characters to be either heroes or villains but Martel sees them only as flawed human beings. Like the knowing half-smile etched on Amalia's face, her universe is imbued with a mystery that simply observes rather than evaluates. If the ending does not provide us with immediate gratification, it may be because it respects that mystery.

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.

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.

La Niña Santa is one of the smartest, sexiest, tenderest, funniest, quiet-and-unassuming movies I've seen in the last half dozen years. It delivers a velvet glove, emotional coup-de-grace (despite the diminuendo ending), and for precisely the reasons the other reviewer adjudged it 'one of the worst movies' she'd ever seen. Isn't curious how we all differ?; the screenplay is intelligent without being smart-alec, nuanced in the most tender of manners, and slyly humorous. Yes, it takes 13 minutes, or more, to figure out what's what and that is only one of the film's glories. What may seem like amateurish framing is clearly a masterful use of the camera in a sensual-naturalistic mode. Its hard to believe this is writer-director's (Lucrecia Martel) second feature film; there is an understated command of all the elements of cinema that reminds one of Kieslowski (and the brothers Dardenne; Truffaut); and perhaps that is another reason the film has elicited strong reaction.

The Kieslowski reference is not casual, for the theme of the film is the subtle palpitations of the heart, in particular feminine desire, conjoined with a moral dilemma. Much of the plot focuses on Amalia, the teenage daughter of Helena, a sophisticated divorcée who runs a hot-springs resort where a doctor's conference is being held. Dr. Jano, the third protagonist, takes a somewhat perverse fancy to Amalia, 'casually' rubbing himself up against her in a crowd on the street packed around a man performing on a theremin. This incident (which is reprised) in conjunction with Amalia's religious - 'what is our vocation in God?' - instruction (also reprised) serves to awaken Amalia's desire in, what to her, is a disturbing and profound manner: she conceives that she has been given a 'sign' of her vocation to save the soul of this anonymous man.

Complications arise, mostly for Dr. Jano, when he meets Helena in the hotel bar and falls gently into the perfume of their mutual attraction. Amalia keeps following him, haunting him in a way he is not comfortable with, all the while he is being drawn to Helena and she to him. Slowly it dawns on him that Amalia is Helena's daughter and he realizes, but he alone, that he is caught in a moral bind.

One of the supreme glories of this story is the tender way in which the group of teenage girls, Amalia and her friends, are represented (again this reminds one of Kieslowski, the brothers Dardenne, Truffaut). They are seen to be curious and critical-skeptical, naive and wise, awakening to a world of desire about which they are 'technically' ignorant and innocent. María Alche as Amalia, has a face and a presence that is at once homely and luminous. It is so rare, and so moving, to encounter a story in which the dilemmas of teenagers are given as much credence as adults, treated by the story-teller (both script and camera) with respect, compassion, love, and understanding; and this is even more rare, I think, when it concerns teenage girls. If you love women, whatever your gender, you might just fall in love with La Niña Santa.

A revelation; Lucrecia Martel (writer-director) is clearly a new and major point of reference on the world cinematic horizon.