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.
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.