Blessed Restraint
Lucrecia Martel, director  Amalia, the watchful, sullen-looking teenage heroine of 'The Holy Girl,' is intermittently fascinated with the religious idea of vocation. In the midst of her awkward age, subject to the usual moods and mysteries of female adolescence, she seems to be listening for the voice of God in the hissing radiators and clattering furniture of the hotel where she lives with her mother. Amalia's prayers may or may not be answered, but there is no doubt that her creator, Lucrecia Martel, has found her calling as one of Argentina's -- and the world's -- bravest and most original filmmakers.
'The Holy Girl,' which mesmerized audiences at the Cannes and New York film festivals last year (and which opens theatrically later this month), is Martel's second feature film. Like its predecessor, 'La Ciénaga' ('The Swamp'), it takes place in Salta, the province in northwestern Argentina, not far from the Bolivian border, where Martel, 38, grew up. Far from the cosmopolitan bustle of Buenos Aires, Salta, at least in Martel's imagination, bears some resemblance to the American South as rendered in the fiction of Carson McCullers or the young Truman Capote. Seen though the eyes of curious, sensitive, vaguely discontented children, it is a place of family secrets and repressed emotions, its atmosphere at once languorous and feverish, where gothic shadows fall on the dull routines of daily life.
Terrible things do happen in these movies (Martel's next project will be a horror film), but at the same time nothing much happens at all. She takes the material of melodrama -- family dysfunction, violated innocence, sexual recklessness -- and pares away the lurid details, favoring obliqueness and subtlety over histrionics. At times, the films seem to be composed of scenes that other, less disciplined filmmakers would have edited away or never filmed at all. Their central stories emerge in retrospect, as a succession of whispered conversations, and oblique images coalesce, at the last moment, into an indelible pattern.
Watching 'The Holy Girl' or 'La Ciénaga,' you sometimes feel as if you are spying or eavesdropping, piecing together secret messages from incomplete information. Your eye travels to the edge of Martel's frames (which are meticulously composed so as to appear haphazard), and your ear strains after noises emerging from an unseen source. This experience, like those undergone by her characters, is unsettling and intense, as your emotions outrun your comprehension. It is a form of suspense that is more like ecstasy, a word that, fittingly enough, has both a sensual and a spiritual meaning. Amalia is, in the end, a mundane creature, but the title of 'The Holy Girl' is not altogether ironic. In observing this girl and those around her struggle with their worldly problems, Martel lifts them -- and us -- into a state of heightened perception that deserves to be described as grace.
A. O. Scott
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 4-10-05: PAGE TURNER