The Cinematheque

“Elusive, feverish, and altogether amazing … A film that defies categorization, but I’m tempted to call it a miracle.”

A.O. Scott, New York Times

Lucrecia Martel, doyenne of the New Argentine Cinema, delivered on the sizable promise of her debut La Ciénaga with this strange and sensual sophomore effort about a teenage girl’s mission to deliver a man from sin. Amalia (María Alché) is a 16-year-old Catholic student living with her mother, a lonely divorcee (Mercedes Morán), in the dilapidated family-owned hotel they run in small-town Salta. While attending a medical conference held at the inn, a visiting doctor molests Amalia on a crowded street corner, setting in motion a troubling bid for his salvation by the spiritually devout, sexually awakened ​“holy girl.” Rendered in allusive tones, the crumbling setting becomes less a tangible space than an abstract site of whispered prayer, carnal temptation, and middle-class moral malaise. The intimacies fostered by Martel’s formal ingenuity—a brilliant use of peripheral sound, in particular—feel revelatory in their visceral impact.