May 12-18, 2005

movies

Under Glass

INTERFERENCE: María Alche and Carlos Belloso

The Holy Girl takes too many steps back.

by Sam Adams

Movies are defined in terms of vision, but Lucrecia Martel doesn't want to show too much. In The Holy Girl, set at a medical conference in a sleepy Argentinean hotel, Martel makes a fetish of wide-angle lenses and shallow focal planes, centering the frame on out-of-focus objects while relegating her subjects to a peripheral sliver. Arranging actors in asymmetrical patterns reminiscent of Antonioni or Resnais — influences that account for the way critics d'un certain age fawn over her — Martel applies a deliberate, anti-naturalist style to mundane events, always reminding you where you're looking and where you're not. Or more accurately, where you can't.

Only the bespectacled Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso) shares Martel's myopia, but the movie is rife with failures of the body's basic functions. As she watches her catechism teacher (Alias' M'a Maestro) shakily sing a hymn, Amalia (heavy-lidded Mar'a Alche) whispers to her best friend Jose (Julieta Zylberberg), "She doesn't know how to breathe."

Martel's style is as once sensual and cerebral; details are imminent, their context fuzzy. Even the most basic of relationships are gleaned from incidentals, like the fact that Helena (Mercedes Morn), who owns the hotel where Jano's conference is being held, is Amalia's mother. The Holy Girl isn't plotless, but Martel wants us to uncover the plot rather than ingest it.

The story kicks into gear when Jano comes upon a crowd listening to a storefront theremin recital and spots Amalia standing at the back. He sidles up and presses himself against her, scuttling away when she turns in shock, but Amalia's disorientation quickly transmutes into an obsession with Jano's salvation. Jose and her boyfriend are desperately trying to have premarital sex without damning themselves, but Amalia's unformed sexuality gets mixed in with half-understood Sunday school lessons, forming an erotic-spiritual hybrid that makes Jano the focus of all her desires, not just the saintly ones.

Despite its title, The Holy Girl only flirts with Catholicism, which is more interesting to Martel as a social construct than a system of faith; there hasn't been a movie so focused on sainthood without expressing any belief in it since Breaking the Waves. Martel is so intent on distancing us from her characters, from everything, that alienation becomes an end in itself, a demonstration of technique rather than a use of it. The first time I watched The Holy Girl, I wondered if Martel's strategies served a deeper purpose, but on second viewing, it became clear that her repetitive compositions are a crutch. Like the theremin that provides the movie's only accompaniment, The Holy Girl's mysticism is mechanical, its ambiguity a refuge rather than a provocation. Unlike Antonioni or Resnais, Martel doesn't ask her actors to ape her disaffection, but that just makes the separation from what seem like fine performances more aggravating. Martel's not a disaffected hipster, but her professional remove grows as tiresome as a soul patch.

The Holy Girl Written and directed by Lucrecia Martel A Fine Line release Opens Friday at Ritz East