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.

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.

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.

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.