| THE HOLY GIRL La Niña Santa |
 2005 – Argentina / Italy / Netherlands / SpainDirector: Lucrecia Martel
- Reviewed by Vickie
The film is set at an Argentinian hotel hosting a medical conference. One of the doctors attending the conference is Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso), a supremely creepy guy with a receding hairline and big glasses, who gets his kicks rubbing himself up against teenage girls standing in crowds. One such teenage girl is Amalia (María Alche), a wide-eyed and hormonal Catholic girl in search of her life’s vocation. Somehow, she gets it in her head that her “mission” in life will be to “save” this skeevy doctor. Save him from what? It’s never really clear. Himself? His sins? His life of debauchery? Dunno. But maybe her vocation doesn’t require specifics. While Amalia ponders her next move, her divorcée mother (Mercedes Morán) also (and somewhat inexplicably, given his creepiness) starts attempting to woo Dr. Jano. Neither woman knows the other is pursuing the same man, but Dr. Jano puts two and two together soon enough and gets a little panicky…especially since he’s married. And really, that’s pretty much all there is to The Holy Girl. It ends without resolution, which would have been fine if its preceding 90 minutes had been strong enough to survive a non-conclusion. I get it, it’s an Art Film about a teen girl’s coming of age and should be left open to the interpretation of the viewer, but I felt incredibly cheated. Perhaps I missed its extreme subtlety, or maybe the subtlety was so subtle that I had no choice but to miss it completely, but I walked out of the theater thinking, “Okay. A movie about a weird girl chasing a freaky man for no discernable reason. Whatever.” Sometimes what’s left unspoken really needs to be spoken. There are numerous facets of the movie that I didn’t even catch until afterwards, when I read up on it further in a bid to decipher some of the things I didn’t understand. I didn’t realize Amalia’s family owns the hotel housing the conference, for starters. I kept wondering if she and her mother were maids (since they knew all the housekeeping staff)! And, as I type this, I still have no clue why Mía Maestro (of The Motorcycle Diaries and TV’s Alias) was even in this film. Her character leads a sort of study group on Catholicism and cries while she’s singing a hymn because of something some man did to her… but I sure couldn’t tell you what it was or why she’s tearing up. I guess my problem was expecting a linear story. The Holy Girl is more about symbolism and deep thinking which, I suppose, wasn’t in the cards for me on the day I saw it. |
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Writer-director Lucrecia Martel’s drama left me wanting more, and not
in a good way. I’d read several glowing reviews of the film before I
attended the screening, so it was with some degree of disappointment
that I sat and watched it unspool, and I left with far more questions
than answers.
