The Holy Girl (2005)

Thanks for the memories!

People are voting emotionally.

Admirable film.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Yesterday, in my lunch time, I saw this new-released DVD on sale in a store. I had no information about "La Niña Santa", but its cover had the symbols of participation in the Cannes, Toronto and New York Festivals, and four favorable reviews (from "Le Monde", "Premiere", Sergio Rizzo (unknown for me) from the "Folha de São Paulo" and "New York Times"). When I read the name of one of the producers, Pedro Almodóvar, and that this movie was awarded in the "Mostra International de Cinema de São Paulo", I unfortunately decided to buy it."La Niña Santa" is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The screenplay is terrible: the viewer can see that the story is in a Latin country (Argentina indeed), but the explanation is only found reading the cover of the DVD. It takes thirteen minutes to understand that the location is a hotel welcoming a conference of physicians and surgeons. The group of gossipy girls in a choir is never explained if they belong to a church or school. The amateurish framing recalled my son, when he was a baby boy and had some trouble to use the camcorder, cutting heads, shoulders, legs of feet in his footages; the same happens along the whole movie. Based on the foregoing remarks, the poor direction is simply terrible. Last but not the least, even the cast composed by ugly actors and actress is not attractive. My advice: although having a great lobby, do not waste your time and money in this crap. My vote is one.Title (Brazil): "A Menina Santa" ("The Saint Girl")

It is very rare that a movie trusts a viewer to draw his own conclusions about the characters and events in a movie. The ones that do, if they're any good at all, are among the best of their kind. This movie presents its characters as we would meet them in life, without the manipulative cues that normally clue you in on how you are supposed to feel (musical score, camera angles, establishing shots). You are not even sure at first who the main characters are; you have to - God help you - work at discovering what is going on. The theme of the movie is unfamiliar: it is about the weird symbiosis between sexuality and religious passion that is manifest in the title character. The film's characters are unglamorous, their motives obscure, the setting of the movie is mundane, the incidents of the plot are unsensational, the pace is slow and the ending is ambiguous. Sounds like fun, right? The odd thing is that it is continuously absorbing. It is the most life-like movie I have seen for years.

This is a difficult movie mainly because it attempts to reach for an elusive subject: the enormous power of women over men, in spite of their ostensibly inferior status.The story is so idiosyncratic that we have to believe it is drawn from the director's life, and it is told in an appropriately intense, hyper-naturalistic way.As the meaning of the film emerges, very slowly, like watching paint dry, we realise that one lapse into temptation by an elite surgeon could plunge him into public disgrace and destroy his family and his career. And yet, the object of his momentary lust, a 15 year-old, has no idea of his fate in the all-male medical masonry hanging in her grasp, while her mother flirts with him, equally unaware but for quite different reasons.The girl, Amalia, is receiving intensive Roman Catholic instruction, which is as peculiar and fanatical for Latin girls as any madrassah Islamic brainwashing is for boys. The instructor weeps while singing the canticles about Hell and Heaven, and impresses the girls that they will definitely have a religious vocation, and will recognise the signs. Amalia, however, has more belief in the work of her own fingers under the sheets.The superstitious cult fills the girls' heads with nonsense and Amalia seems to think at one point that she can console and even seduce her father figure. She may well be emotionally disturbed by the divorce of her parents, and the imminent birth of twins to her unknown stepmother.Her friend, meanwhile, is engaging in sordid anal copulation with her boyfriend, simply to keep him around, while believing she is retaining her virginity. That's the wicked work of religious morality.I'm not sure how much women like to see themselves depicted in this unglamorous light, so the picture may well not be a hit at the box office, where the purchasing decision is often theirs. Nor is the storytelling method consumer-friendly, showing no exteriors and building characters slowly and haphazardly.

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.