Beyond the Multiplex

An Israeli-American director tracks down her Palestinian nanny's family. An Argentine hotshot tells a story of sexual awakening. Plus: French cinema's newest coltish sex symbol.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

April 28, 2005 | The Israeli-born documentary filmmaker Danae Elon told me something this week that I can already tell is going to stick for a while. She tries to keep political opinions out of her films, she says, because "they don't work." They create an immediate impasse: You agree or disagree, and either way you're in a box. What works in film is relationships, human interactions, because by their very nature they're open-ended, unpredictable, surprising.

You can read more of Elon's comments below, but I'm on a particular mission to get people to see her film "Another Road Home." Yeah, it's a documentary about Israelis and Palestinians, but it isn't what a friend of mine calls "spinach cinema." (Good for you and packed with vitamins, but not so super-interesting.) It's a pure, bracing, philosophically challenging movie, but more than that it's a great story about human relationships, so it's open-ended, unpredictable, etc.

Every time I watch another pile of new films I start to see patterns of connection between them, and those may be imaginary. I don't really believe that memes or shared ideas are spreading virally from one director to another, across continents and vastly different approaches to the medium. Maybe what I'm seeing are the patterns in human life that are there all the time, concentrated and distilled.

This time around the pattern has been, as Elon says, relationships. I know: Duh. More specifically, it's been the often daunting relationships between parents and their adult children, and also the intensely passionate, self-centered, almost world-destroying relationships forged by teenage girls, with each other, with boys, with themselves. The former appear in Elon's movie (her dad is the left-wing Israeli writer Amos Elon) and in a movie I'll get to next time, Mark Wexler's "Tell Them Who You Are," which is about his father, the famous cinematographer (and political radical) Haskell Wexler.

On the teenage-girl front, there are two excellent new imports to add to what's already shaping up as a banner year for foreign flicks (and specifically for what used to oh-so-charmingly be known as "art films"). Mind you, I'm not sure anybody's going out to see them except you and me. But we'll have fun. It'll be like the '70s: We'll wear funny raincoats and smoke in the theater, and after the movie's over we'll know the only coffee house in town that makes a decent cappuccino, even if the place always has that faint odor of somebody having left the Camembert out for a week. If I get there late, put yeast on my popcorn.

"The Holy Girl": God's love vs. a tortured street perv
We never completely know where we are or what's going on in "The Holy Girl" (an awkward but correct translation of the original title, "La Niña Santa"), the new movie from hot-as-a-summer-sidewalk Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. If that sort of thing drives you crazy, then stay home. But Martel is after subjective reality, specifically the cloistered, hothouse world of Amalia (Maria Alché), a sullen, freckled nymphet of 14 or so who is torn between her love of Jesus and the ticking bomb of her sexuality.

Martel's plot is a tangled melodrama you'll piece together eventually: Amalia gets groped on the street by a respectable citizen and becomes obsessed with him, essentially becoming his stalker. (He's not interested; a little nasty friction through the pants was apparently all he had in mind.) But the bespectacled perv (Carlos Belloso) turns out to be a doctor attending a medical conference in the hotel where Amalia lives with her mother, Helena (Mercedes Morán), an attractive divorcee who's exuding a more worldly form of horniness.

But that's only explaining a little of the tremendous, hypnotic power of "The Holy Girl." When and where are we? There are only a few clues: Probably somewhere in Argentina, sometime around 1980. Why do Amalia and Helena live in a crumbling resort hotel with an unidentified older woman? We never know. And much of the film consists of tight-focus shots of Amalia and her best friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) as they whisper gossip and sexual secrets, run crashing through the woods in one of those mysteriously frightening moments of adolescent freedom, practice French kissing, or try to induce religious visions.

Amalia's world is one of intense communion with whatever and whoever, and of course mostly herself. The poles of her existence are the music store where a man is demonstrating a theremin (which is somehow perfect) while the unfortunate Dr. Jano presses his corduroy-clad woody into her backside, and the cultlike Catholic education classes where a startlingly beautiful instructor (Mía Maestro) urges the girls to seek a "vocation," meaning, as the Blues Brothers would say, a mission from God. Amalia thinks she's got one, and it apparently involves sneaking into Dr. Jano's room when he's not there and masturbating in his bed.

I suppose Martel means this movie as a parable about the fungible nature of good and evil, but we don't have to go there right now. It's a marvelously acted film, driven by a sweaty-palmed, exponentially mounting tension. What Jano has done to Amalia is of course contemptible, and I guess he earns his comeuppance. Does he deserve to encounter the scariest teenage girl since Linda Blair in "The Exorcist"? That part's up to you.

"The Holy Girl" opens April 29 in New York, with a national release to follow in May.

Next page: A director dives into her past and comes up with a film as pure as ice water