>>REVIEW
THE HOLY GIRL
STARRING Maria Alche, Carlos Belloso, Mercedes Moran
DIRECTED BY Lucrecia Martel
Opens Friday, August 19
Plaza Theatre
In Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s sharply observed followup to her 2001 debut La Cienaga, a 16-year-old girl develops a fixation on a middle-aged doctor. Yet the teen’s intentions are more religious than carnal. A sad-eyed student at a Catholic school, Amalia (Maria Alche) lives in the once-posh hotel where her divorced mother works. A suggestive encounter sparks her interest in the eternal soul of Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso), who has come to the hotel to attend a convention of ear-nose-and-throat specialists. Amalia’s mother, Helena (Mercedes Moran), is also drawn to the doctor, whose average looks and nervous manner make him an unlikely chick magnet.
Although this premise makes The Holy Girl sound like a Benny Hill sketch about a randy MD, Martel’s intentions are rather more subtle. The Holy Girl is the latest film to emerge from what’s known as new Argentine cinema or the Argentine new wave, a group of young filmmakers who have weathered the country’s economic collapse to create a growing body of remarkable work. Of the three most notable titles to debut at festivals last year, The Holy Girl is neither as immediately appealing as Pablo Trapero’s Rolling Family nor as daring as Lisondro Alonso’s The Dead. But Martel’s movie is just as rich, largely thanks to the director’s coolly disciplined visual style, her keenly sympathetic attitude toward her characters (especially the women) and her ability to convey the erotic charge and conflicting emotions that leave them feeling confused and overheated.
Moreover, Martel is wise to draw the connection between the adolescent Amalia’s catechism-and-hormone-fuelled crisis and the older characters’ desire to escape their dreary existences, if only fleetingly. The tendency to present the actors in extreme close-up also contributes to their sense of confinement and growing need to find a way out. Martel’s approach is too reserved and cerebral to allow for any major catharsis or, for that matter, a satisfying round of saucy hijinks. Yet the final scenes of The Holy Girl are provocative and unnerving because of the way Martel precisely reveals the characters’ inability to fully comprehend both their own motivations and each other’s. |
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