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.

La Niña Santa is one of the smartest, sexiest, tenderest, funniest, quiet-and-unassuming movies I've seen in the last half dozen years. It delivers a velvet glove, emotional coup-de-grace (despite the diminuendo ending), and for precisely the reasons the other reviewer adjudged it 'one of the worst movies' she'd ever seen. Isn't curious how we all differ?; the screenplay is intelligent without being smart-alec, nuanced in the most tender of manners, and slyly humorous. Yes, it takes 13 minutes, or more, to figure out what's what and that is only one of the film's glories. What may seem like amateurish framing is clearly a masterful use of the camera in a sensual-naturalistic mode. Its hard to believe this is writer-director's (Lucrecia Martel) second feature film; there is an understated command of all the elements of cinema that reminds one of Kieslowski (and the brothers Dardenne; Truffaut); and perhaps that is another reason the film has elicited strong reaction.The Kieslowski reference is not casual, for the theme of the film is the subtle palpitations of the heart, in particular feminine desire, conjoined with a moral dilemma. Much of the plot focuses on Amalia, the teenage daughter of Helena, a sophisticated divorcée who runs a hot-springs resort where a doctor's conference is being held. Dr. Jano, the third protagonist, takes a somewhat perverse fancy to Amalia, 'casually' rubbing himself up against her in a crowd on the street packed around a man performing on a theremin. This incident (which is reprised) in conjunction with Amalia's religious - 'what is our vocation in God?' - instruction (also reprised) serves to awaken Amalia's desire in, what to her, is a disturbing and profound manner: she conceives that she has been given a 'sign' of her vocation to save the soul of this anonymous man.Complications arise, mostly for Dr. Jano, when he meets Helena in the hotel bar and falls gently into the perfume of their mutual attraction. Amalia keeps following him, haunting him in a way he is not comfortable with, all the while he is being drawn to Helena and she to him. Slowly it dawns on him that Amalia is Helena's daughter and he realizes, but he alone, that he is caught in a moral bind.One of the supreme glories of this story is the tender way in which the group of teenage girls, Amalia and her friends, are represented (again this reminds one of Kieslowski, the brothers Dardenne, Truffaut). They are seen to be curious and critical-skeptical, naive and wise, awakening to a world of desire about which they are 'technically' ignorant and innocent. María Alche as Amalia, has a face and a presence that is at once homely and luminous. It is so rare, and so moving, to encounter a story in which the dilemmas of teenagers are given as much credence as adults, treated by the story-teller (both script and camera) with respect, compassion, love, and understanding; and this is even more rare, I think, when it concerns teenage girls. If you love women, whatever your gender, you might just fall in love with La Niña Santa.A revelation; Lucrecia Martel (writer-director) is clearly a new and major point of reference on the world cinematic horizon.

Yesterday, in my lunch time, I saw this new-released DVD on sale in a store. I had no information about "La Niña Santa", but its cover had the symbols of participation in the Cannes, Toronto and New York Festivals, and four favorable reviews (from "Le Monde", "Premiere", Sergio Rizzo (unknown for me) from the "Folha de São Paulo" and "New York Times"). When I read the name of one of the producers, Pedro Almodóvar, and that this movie was awarded in the "Mostra International de Cinema de São Paulo", I unfortunately decided to buy it."La Niña Santa" is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The screenplay is terrible: the viewer can see that the story is in a Latin country (Argentina indeed), but the explanation is only found reading the cover of the DVD. It takes thirteen minutes to understand that the location is a hotel welcoming a conference of physicians and surgeons. The group of gossipy girls in a choir is never explained if they belong to a church or school. The amateurish framing recalled my son, when he was a baby boy and had some trouble to use the camcorder, cutting heads, shoulders, legs of feet in his footages; the same happens along the whole movie. Based on the foregoing remarks, the poor direction is simply terrible. Last but not the least, even the cast composed by ugly actors and actress is not attractive. My advice: although having a great lobby, do not waste your time and money in this crap. My vote is one.Title (Brazil): "A Menina Santa" ("The Saint Girl")

The first time I started to watch this movie was after drinking two beers pretending they would be enough to send my stressful day at work into the past and help me indulge in the simple pleasures of idleness.I couldn't understand anything of the first 20 minutes and falling sleep won the match. I didn't take this loosely the next day, first of all I speak Spanish and the language was not an issue, secondly, if two beers are making me so incompetent, AA in my area will be my next google search.So I decided to give the movie (and me) a new chance the next night. This time, though, no beer, volume all the way up and the intention of conquering a task with the eagerness that can come only from being defeated at it beforehand.Nope, still no good. This time I say the whole thing and I must say, this is the Iraq war of movies: A complete mess without justification.On purpose I will leave aside the cinematic details so I don't sound like a wannabe connoisseur (MS Word corrected this word, BTW) or a reviewer with some clout, I am just a disgruntle customer exposed to this almost comic levels of ineptness portrayed as a Drama film.Well, the single merit of this thing is that it has more scenes of people lying on beds than a porn movie (but in this case, they are not doing anything, just there… and still there…. There….forever). Secondly, actors don't do anything (again); they are just Argentinean mannequins whispering some absurd words in an environment that makes no sense with a plot that seems to have been written on the back of the check that founded this idea of a film.The trite recipe of inserting some shocking scenes on the film so they carry the chore of making the rest of the movie worth something, again, fails. The director shows almost a sadistic delight on keeping the camera 6 inches away from the unanimated character, thinking that this is enough to portray a study of human something (sickness, emotions, whatever because we never know at the end) and give a social commentary of something even more groped by intellectualoids: Religion and Sex. The time goes by and nothing happens, nothing is concluded. This idleness is way better than the one I was expecting from my two beers the day before, but this is not fun, this is a waste.Blockbuster now remembers me as "the crazy dude that wanted a refund for a bad movie he rented". Well, yes, I returned this movie, made a scene and got my $4.86 back. Is not possible that rubbish like this gets distributed and God forbids, other project got rejected or delayed. I know is not a fair world, but this is testing the limits.I will always support foreign movies, especially from Latin America, but something I can't support is to perpetuate mediocrity by implying that because the movie was produced in Argentina or that the director is a woman, or that the theme is so controversial, it can get away by overlooking quality, coherence or merit.The good news is that my drinking is not a health issue (yet). This movie is awful, drunk or sober.