WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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All of this sounds melodramatic, but in Lucrecia Martel’s film, it is anything but. There is a visible evolution in Martel’s narrative style from her first film. If you submit to its oblique, indirect sensibility, at the end you will be rewarded. The revelation is that in Holy Girl, Martel is doing nothing less than inventing a new, very personal and individual narrative style—a way and means of telling cinematic stories which belong to no one but her.

In Holy Girl, the constant surprises and twists arrive in little moments. Holy Girl, said Martel in an interview, “is not about the confrontation between good and evil, but about the difficulties in distinguishing one from the other.” It is the layers of these similarities that she wants to explore. She is not interested in black and white, but in the shadows, the infinite horizon where colors blur and lose their identity. Nothing is exactly as it seems. As the film opens, a young Catholic teacher leads a group of girls in choir practice. “What is it, Lord, you want of me?” sings the teacher as tears well up in her eyes, but Amalia and her girlfriend Josefina are whispering to each other about the teacher’s rumored love affairs.

Amalia, whose adolescent sexuality propels the events in the film, sees a sign in an incident with Dr. Jano at the conference. In the midst of a crowd watching a demonstration of the theremin, the musical instrument which produces an other-worldly sound, the doctor rubs against her. Josefina, Amalia’s friend, condenses the incident into: “He interfered with her.” But as the film progresses, Amalia discovers her sexuality not only as a gradual understanding of her needs. She realizes that power and humiliation are integral to this sexual quest. Dr. Jano, the object of her attention, proves to be elusive: he gets his kicks by going into crowds and pressing his groin against a young girl.

At the end of the film, we know that Amalia’s world is about to come crushing down because her best friend has spilled her secret. But Holy Girl is not a film about big surprises. It is a film of slow, studied observations of surfaces and their reflections. It is in these reflections that a disturbing and absurd inner world is gradually revealed to us. “Who are these people?” we feel forced to ask, “How did they get here?,” “What are they doing here?,” and then slowly we realize that their obsessions, their twisted sexual games, their quest for power over one another are the real world, the world of the present, of our present.

Lucrecia Martel is a true original—in her own way, an artist as audacious as Jackson Pollock. She is unafraid to go down uncharted paths, to create a film which works like a puzzle. If you come to Holy Girl looking for anything literal or real, you will be turned off and disappointed. If you let the film envelop you like a dream, it will be profound.

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