The Holy Girl
by Chris Dashiell

At times during The Holy Girl , the new film from Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel, the title character Amalia breaks into a strange, crooked smile that seems almost devilish, in contrast to the girl's usual wide-eyed, rapturous stare. This extraordinary glimpse of the hidden unity of innocence and sexuality, so central to the film, could by itself have caused the director to choose this young actress, María Alche, to play the heroine. As it happens, this is just one telling detail in a carefully orchestrated tapestry of haunting effects.

Amalia is a girl in early adolescence who lives in a hotel, takes Catholic classes with her precocious friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg), and becomes obsessed with finding her "vocation" as a saint. When she joins a crowd watching a theremin performance, a man (Carlos Belloso) stands behind her and touches her sexually. Amalia becomes obsessed with helping this man find salvation, and it turns out that he is a doctor attending a medical conference at the hotel. She starts to follow him around at a distance, which thoroughly unnerves him. In the meantime he begins a mild flirtation with Helena (Mercedes Morán), a still-beautiful former champion swimmer whom he persuades to play a part in a demonstration that will close the conference. What the middle-aged physician, married with children, does not realize is that Helena is Amalia's mother.

Such is the outline of a plot. But Martel's method, just as in her first film La Ciénaga , is to thrust the audience into the world of the story without exposition or explanation. That we feel like strangers in an unfamiliar environment is part of the intended effect--we are meant to see the complicated interactions of the characters without the comfort of preparation, like startled, newly awakened spectators left to find our own way. Familiarity with Martel's first film helped me to recognize that we are once again in northern Argentina , but it took me almost an hour to figure out that Amalia's mother Helena and uncle Freddie (Alejandro Urdapilleta) are the owners of the hotel in which most of the film's action takes place. This calculated sense of dislocation is sustained throughout the picture. Among other things, it evokes in the viewer the wandering, rootless feeling of living in a hotel--or in Amalia's case, growing up in one. Martel is interested in the tenuous experience of strangers, ruled mainly by chance and coincidence--people rubbing elbows not by choice but through the arbitrary force of circumstance.

Events unfold with seeming randomness, just as we follow characters through situations that seem peripheral to the central concerns of the story. Freddie's half-hearted attempt to call his Chilean ex-wife, a seemingly inconsequential detail, is given as much emphasis as any other action in the film. We are steeped in an atmosphere by which meaning arises among the myriad, winding threads of life. The girls mix their mystical Catholic aspirations with adolescent sexual awakening, but Martel doesn't underline this. It is there like a dye coloring the film's narrative fabric. Another recurring theme is the ambivalent relationship between affluent, light-skinned Argentines and their Indian servants, a relationship combining intimate dependence and a faintly hostile distance--yet this is only hinted at, on the edges of awareness.

Sound is just as precise an element in The Holy Girl as vision. Martel's soundtrack is full of the incidental noise of a busy urban space, and through this we are always aware of an outside world impinging on the private thoughts and actions of the characters. Once again, the effect is of a total experience rather than the usual dramatic effect of spotlighting a single aspect.

Helena embodies many of the story's contradictions--forthright, sophisticated, but needy; loving her daughter but blind to the girl's inner world. Moran's performance is a model of understated grace, tinged with anxiety and self-doubt. Martel has been most careful, or most fortunate, in all of her casting. The girls Amalia and Josefina, for instance, appear as both beautiful and ugly, awkward and uncannily unknowing, the way girls at that particular age could be. Belloso's furtive Dr. Jano is not a soulless predator, but someone made miserable by his own compulsions, racked with fear and guilt. It is a fine performance, and it's proof of Martel's depth as a filmmaker that she makes all of her characters real and human, and we can feel sympathy even for this man.

The film's title is not meant as a joke, although quite a few of Martel's thematic touches--such as the sound of a theremin standing in for the voice of God--are slyly humorous. The Holy Girl exposes the divide between spirituality and sexuality as inherently false and destructive. As peculiar and isolated as she is, Amalia finds a way of forgiveness that transcends social boundaries and strictures. The disaster that looms is outside her control, and we can only watch in wonder as she glides through the perilous circumstances in a place of loneliness that seems akin to sacred awe.