La Niña santa

Dr Jano (Carlos Bello), a respectable ear, nose and throat specialist with a wife and children, attends a medical conference at a run-down hotel, and in a moment - or, to be precise, two moments - of lustful weakness, presses himself against the posterior of an adolescent girl in a street crowd. What he does not realise is that the girl, Amalia (Maria Alché), is the daughter of the hotel manager Helena (Mercedes Morán), a divorcee known to Jano from her past as a competition board-diver. As an awkward relationship between Helena and Jano never quite gets off the ground, the doctor is secretly stalked by Amalia, who, caught between her strict Catholic education and her ripening sexuality, is not sure whether she wants to save Jano's soul or adopt a different kind of missionary position altogether. With passions erupting, misunderstandings multiplying, and Jano's family due to descend on the hotel, the well-meaning doctor is forced onto centre stage at the tragic farce of his own undoing.

On paper it may sound like a mere comedy of manners, but Lucrecia Martel's 'La Niña Santa' plays itself out more like a delicately observed drama of human fallibility and compromise. Opening with a Catholic teacher lecturing her class on the certainties which a calling to divine service brings, even as Amalia and her friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) whisper to each other about seeing the same teacher tonguing an older man, 'La Niña Santa' is full of morally ambiguous situations and characters who have lost the vocations of their youth. Helena misses diving, her brother Freddy (Alejandro Urdapilleta) wishes he had not given up his studies or become estranged from his children, Mirta (Marta Lubos) is a trained physiotherapist who has reluctantly become the hotel's cook, Amalia and Josefina are rapidly relinquishing their grip on childhood innocence, and Jano is a doctor who secretly yearns to be an actor, but looks set to lose everything that he has in both his professional and personal life.

Indeed, all the characters in this film seem, like the contradictory Roman god of beginnings and endings after whom Dr Jano is named, to be suspended in a sort of limbo between past and future. In Helena's hotel, life's journeys are put temporarily on hold, intimate spaces are shared with complete strangers, and the sacred and the secular, the young and the old, the academic and the erotic all come together under the one roof, in a collision of ideologies that can have unpredictable consequences.

Official website

La Niña santa at the IMDB

This movie is also known as "The Holy Girl" which I really liked. I'd give it 7/10!