The Holy Girl (2005)

As Good As It Gets

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I've just seen this scintillating HBO foreign movie from Argentina. It is so slick, so stacked with moral cards, the filmmaker couldn't bring herself to show the apocalyptic ending. Its called the Holy Girl. The film is about a divorced woman who works in a hotel where she lives with her daughter. The hotel is playing host to a physician's convention. Her daughter Amalia and other girls her age (16) are taking Catholic instructions from a lay woman on how to discover one's religious calling. The mother, Helena, has just learned her ex has had twins by another woman in Chile. She is jealous. Amalia and her girlfriend Josephina mix sexual chatter with spiritual uplift at Instructions each day. Josephina tells her the instructor makes love with a strange man the minute she can break away from the class, a myth both lusting teenagers would like to believe. The two girls pretend at making love together in place of the real thing. One of the doctors at the conference attracts the eye of the mother who begins to play up to him. He is married. Meanwhile, the daughter is standing watching a street musician perform when the same doctor - his name is Nano- comes up close behind her and rubs his penis up against her rear end while standing behind her. The girl's face is fearful and distorted while this is going on. Doctor Nano abruptly stops and moves away. The daughter tells her friend she has been 'groped.' But secretly, she is smitten with the fiftyish Doctor, and spends the rest of the film trying to coax him to make love to her. Meanwhile Helena is trying too. The Doctor is seriously interested in doing something with Mom, and slightly troubled about the young girl. He used to bring his wife to these conferences but doesn't any longer. Amalia keeps pressing him, making him more nervous. He conceives a little play-let of a doctor patient interaction to be played in front of the audience of doctors. Meanwhile, Amalia's horny girl friend Jospehina is seen having sex with her brother Julia, when their folks walk in. Needing a distraction to keep the parents from taking notice, she reveals that Amalia has been 'groped' by one of the conference doctors. The parents resolve to tell Helena what has happened. Increasingly nervous about what he knows of these developments, Doctor Nano has summoned his wife and family to travel to the hotel and join him. Nano is just finishing having sex with Amalia when his family arrives in the hotel lobby. Meanwhile, another doctor tells him one of the conference doctors has been caught having sex with a salesman's rep at the conference and has fled to save his reputation. A frantic Nano considers his own options. The play-let is underway. Josephina's parents have alerted the conference organizer that one of their brethren is a child molester. Onstage, Helena waits in a chair for the doctor to enter stage right. Instead, Nano stands backstage petrified to go on. The filmmaker cuts to the two sixteen year olds swimming together in the hotel pool, chatting amiably about girlish matters, the big showdown event apparently behind without disturbing them greatly. Here's the way I think it really ends: Waiting backstage, Nano decides to chuck the career, the family, everything. He pulls off his white doctor's smock, runs down to the pool and grabs Amalia who is waiting smiling for him, her suitcase already packed. The two of them move to Chile near the mother's divorced husband who has just had the twin boys. Later Josephina moves with her brother Julian to Chile to join them. Later still, Helena joins her daughter in Chile where mother and daughter have ribald sexual encounters Nano-a-Nano with the harried doctor, now more nervous than ever. You see there is an element of Pedro Almovador humor infused in this film. The movie is being vaguely subverted by subtle comedy at every turn, including a running joke about a foreign immigrant women in the hotel who no one knows or likes. She sprays rooms for bugs, smells, roaches, no one quite knows what she's spraying for; she enters rooms when it is most inconvenient for the people already in them.

I watched this movie on DVD and I almost suffer a cardiac arrest - terrible piece of art!!!. I had watched The Swamp a couple of years ago, which I found even worse, unbearable really!!!. Lucrecia I'm sorry, but I don't really understand you at all. On top of that, I had the patience to go through all the "making of the movie" and the interviews that the DVD brings, I could not believe all the rubbish I was hearing. Not only you, but everyone who spoke in those interviews looked like complete charlatans. Trying to justify every single bit of the story with silly arguments.Absolutely pointless to keep wasting my time - please do not watch this crap!Cheers, Esteban BernasconiPS: tried to write in Spanish but the system does not accept it!

This is a difficult movie mainly because it attempts to reach for an elusive subject: the enormous power of women over men, in spite of their ostensibly inferior status.The story is so idiosyncratic that we have to believe it is drawn from the director's life, and it is told in an appropriately intense, hyper-naturalistic way.As the meaning of the film emerges, very slowly, like watching paint dry, we realise that one lapse into temptation by an elite surgeon could plunge him into public disgrace and destroy his family and his career. And yet, the object of his momentary lust, a 15 year-old, has no idea of his fate in the all-male medical masonry hanging in her grasp, while her mother flirts with him, equally unaware but for quite different reasons.The girl, Amalia, is receiving intensive Roman Catholic instruction, which is as peculiar and fanatical for Latin girls as any madrassah Islamic brainwashing is for boys. The instructor weeps while singing the canticles about Hell and Heaven, and impresses the girls that they will definitely have a religious vocation, and will recognise the signs. Amalia, however, has more belief in the work of her own fingers under the sheets.The superstitious cult fills the girls' heads with nonsense and Amalia seems to think at one point that she can console and even seduce her father figure. She may well be emotionally disturbed by the divorce of her parents, and the imminent birth of twins to her unknown stepmother.Her friend, meanwhile, is engaging in sordid anal copulation with her boyfriend, simply to keep him around, while believing she is retaining her virginity. That's the wicked work of religious morality.I'm not sure how much women like to see themselves depicted in this unglamorous light, so the picture may well not be a hit at the box office, where the purchasing decision is often theirs. Nor is the storytelling method consumer-friendly, showing no exteriors and building characters slowly and haphazardly.

More admirable than attractive is Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl" – even at this time I am feeling a steady amount of ambivalence toward this maddeningly beautiful film. Is this kind of paradoxical relationship even possible? Even the proverbial sinner in his love/hate toward expiation seems dubious.The film follows Amalia and her friend Josefina's exploits as they navigate their way through a summer of adolescence. Sanctimonious doesn't even begin to describe them – indeed, Amalia is wanting to screw a man she's trying to "save" while Josefina regards her Catholic school teacher with disdain due to the good teacher's sexual adventures even though Josefina herself takes it up the arse from her horny boyfriend. This shopworn irony regarding the duality and dialectical impulses in hormonal, affectedly pious people grows wearisome on the attention span.Okay, but I used the adjective "beautiful" earlier. And it most certainly is from a logistical standpoint. The DP composed seemingly interminable, achingly gorgeous shots of the action. He had no qualms about not using deep-focus photography (in which everything in the frame is in focus). This style harks back to the old American B&W's in which they were not afraid to focus on only one piece of the frame while leaving the rest in a blurry discombobulation. A power erupts from the screen the more pronounced these shots are. However, it must be said, the steady frequency of all this becomes stultifying to an annoying degree – like chocolate in endless supply, it becomes too much of a good thing.This cloying film would have been great if it didn't try so hard to be a great film. Art house flicks mostly subscribe to an overly snobby and abundantly complex ideological schema. Is a show-off praiseworthy? Not in this case.