La fille sainte

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

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.

To enjoy "The Holy Girl," you have to watch it in a certain way. Watching for plot will leave you unsatisfied; I'd recommend watching for character instead. Lucrecia Martel attempts to use her impressive technique to nail down the psychology of her characters; this works especially well for her protagonist, Amalia. While freewheeling through the bush near the reputed site of a post-car crash miracle, a fade to silence fills the air with Amalia's desire for transcendence. (Martel's sound is expressive throughout, particularly a theremin solo as weirdly kinky as the scene it illustrates.)

The most interesting relationship is between Amalia and Jose. Shallow but not empty, they're attractive not because of their bone structure but because of their vitality - it shines through even when they're bored, which is most of the time. Their bond isn't as intense as Kate Winslet's and Melanie Lynskey's in "Heavenly Creatures," but it's the same sort of friendship (albeit not consummated), only things spin out of control in a less bloodstained way. Amalia and a mildly perverted doctor also have some amusing scenes, while the character of Amalia's mother fails to add any more than the predictable ironies.

The movie ends where it ends to avoid humiliating the characters any more than is strictly necessary; I like these endings where something is left to the viewers' imaginations, though obviously not everyone would agree. Some of Martel's social themes, like the way the middle class appropriates religion to serve itself, are lost along the way. "The Holy Girl" isn't as lovably wild as "Y tu mamá también," but on the topic of sexual hypocrisy, it's just as smart, and maybe funnier.

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.

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.