Reliable sources aver that there is a genre of Japanese pornography devoted to subway frottage -- that is, men rubbing against female commuters crammed into underground trains at rush hour. In those films, the victim of the frotteur sometimes develops an affection for her assailant and the couple continue their kinky games at home happily ever after. Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl is an Argentinian film on the same general subject, not pornography but something considerably more complex, disturbing, and mysterious. Indeed, Martel's 2004 movie turns on several incidents of frottage, both consensual and non-consensual. Amalia is a teenage girl who lives in a hotel with her divorced mother and uncle -- the two adults manage the hotel, a dismal-looking establishment that clearly has seen better days. Amalia attends youth group meetings at the Catholic church and is very pious. With her friend, Josefina, she is encouraged to discover her religious vocation. Unfortunately, Amalia decides that her vocation will be to seduce and, therefore, save the soul of a geeky-looking doctor attending a medical conference at the hotel. Amalia is obsessed with this doctor because, one afternoon, he pressed his genitals against her buttocks surreptitiously while she was watching a musician demonstrate the use of the theremin (playing Bach's "Sheep may safely graze.") When the doctor commits this frottage a second time, Amalia takes hold of his hand, reversing the relationship of power, and causing the skinny, balding and bespectacled doctor to flee from her. As it happens, Amalia's lonely mother is also flirting with the frotteur, the unlovely and nerdish Dr. Jano, who has asked her to appear in a skit in the closing session of the medical seminar. Dr. Jano is skittish about advances by Helena, Amalia's mother, a former champion diver whom the doctor has admired (and had a crush on) since he was a teenager. He invites his wife and their children to attend the last day of the seminar and, then, learns to his horror that the girl against whom he has pressed himself is the innkeeper's daughter. Amalia's best friend, the somewhat horse-faced and sexually aggressive, Josefina, has a boyfriend -- she allows her boyfriend to masturbate by rubbing himself against her panty-clad buttocks. When she is caught in bed with this boy, Josefina shifts attention away from her transgressions by telling her parents that Amalia has been sexually molested by "a doctor at the convention." The parents, ignoring Josefina's pleas that they don't disclose this event, storm the hotel and, while Jano and Helena are performing their skit on-stage, self-righteously prepare to accuse the physician of child-molesting. Meanwhile, Josefina and Amalia swim together in the hotel's dilapidated and noisome-looking pool, two nymphets both aware, but also blissfully unconcerned, with the havoc that they have created.
Lucrecia Martel is an important film maker. Her initial movie, La Cienaga (2001) was acclaimed as instituting something of a renaissance in Argentine cinema. Martel has a very distinctive style: she films almost entirely in close-up and steadfastly refuses to employ anything like an establishing shot or, even, a middle-distance shot to establish context. The audience must infer where people are located by the dialogue and slight cues in the bits of décor visible in the images. Similarly, Martel eschews ordinary exposition -- we have to work out the relationship between the parties from very confusing and ambiguous evidence. For instance, Helena is often show in intimate contact with a disheveled older man named Freddy, the general manager of hotel. She combs Freddy's hair, picks lice out of his locks, and, often, lies in bed, albeit fully clad with the man. In several scenes, there is a distinct sexual tension between Helena and Freddy -- but, it turns out, that Freddy is Amalia's uncle, and probably Helena's brother (although he might be her ex-brother-in-law). A censorious older woman named Mirta broods over the action; I think she is Helena's ex-husband's mother -- and it may be that Helena and Freddy have acquired the rundown hotel as part of a divorce settlement, although this is merely surmise on my part. The movie features scenes on the streets of Saltos, a provincial city in northwest Argentina, sequences in a Catholic church, as well as the majority of the film shot in the hotel -- but we don't really see any of these places; the camera sticks resolutely to the faces of the characters. (The hotel is a remarkable location, spooky and decrepit, with a dismal-looking swimming pool -- apparently built around a hot spring -- and dark Victorian galleries and rooms. The DVD of the film comes with " making of" featurette showing just how atmospheric and Gothic the hotel is -- but Martel is so preternaturally disciplined that she doesn't ever use her camera to explore the hotel or its shabby garden environs. We have to infer its appearance and ambience from bits and pieces of image, fragments of corridors and meeting rooms and small claustrophobic bed rooms, glimpsed at the edge of her film-frames crowded with close-up faces.) As in La Cienaga, most of the characters spend all of their time lounging around in bed -- groups of people sharing a bed is a motif in Martel's films. Sometimes, Martel's camera is so close to the action that we see only parts of bodies, a shoulder or an arm or belly. Even when the camera goes outdoors -- in the Saltos streets or when the girls go to a scary accident scene in the country -- the camera stays within 18 inches of the people portrayed. As a result of this film-making style, most of the action occurs outside of the frame and is known to the viewer only by offscreen sounds. A good example is a close-up showing adolescent girls suddenly wide-eyed with fear that, then, becomes obsessive interest -- a drunk man has fallen from a balcony and is staggering around naked outside the window on the ground floor. We see him for only a second. One of the girl's says: "He's already dead. This is just muscle spasms." The viewer has no idea where the man came from or how he fell or who he is -- his appearance is as mysterious to the audience as it is to the bemused girls whose shock seques into prurient interest in his nudity. In another scene, a girl stumbles upon something that she identifies as a severed "hand" -- there is much screaming and running in circles, but we never see the source of the girl's alarm. In the film's final shot, we hear water rushing, a sound that seems to symbolize the girl's sexual prowess, their ability to control the lives of the adults around them with their newly discovered sexuality. But we don't know the source of the water. (The "making of" featurette shows that the "hot pool" or thermal bath periodically refills from water cascading into the pool -- but this source of the cascading sound is not shown in the movie itself.) Martel's actors are beyond reproach. Amalia has a crooked, inquisitive smile and she bares her teeth when she looks at Janos. Janos is certainly not anyone's ideal of an object of obsessive sexual desire -- an aspect of the film that makes it all the more mysterious. (Amalia thinks she is saving Janos' soul by attempting to seduce him.) The beautiful, frustrated Helena is fascinating -- she is played by an Argentine movie star whom the camera clearly loves. And Amalia's friend, Josefina, exudes a kind of raw polymorphous sexuality -- she maintains that she is pure, although she allows her boyfriend to masturbate against her, and she seems to have lesbian inclinations as well, repeatedly kissing Amalia on the mouth. Josefina is not conventionally attractive, but her demeanor and her sex-obsessed teasing make her intensely, and dangerously, seductive. Martel's intent seems to be to convey to the viewer a sultry close-up of female adolescent desire -- and the film has a curious confined and feline hothouse quality. The Holy Girl confirms my view that Martel is one of the most interesting film maker's working today.
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