The Holy Girl (La Nina Santa)
The holy girl in Lucrecia Martel's extraordinarily accomplished film of the same name is a 16-year-old Argentine named Amalia (Maria Alche) who lives in the hotel her mother and uncle own. She and her best friend, Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg), attend a Catholic girls' school where they and their classmates talk about their relationship to God.
Their instructor Ines (Mia Maestro) encourages them to be aware that He is omniscient, omnipresent, and most likely to express, through signs, that His will be done. But when the girls hear the high-pitched undulations of a theremin, that strangely seductive instrument played with two hands conducting the sound waves passing between a pair of antennae, the director wants us to ask: Is that God's call, and if so, why does it sound like a flying saucer is about to land?
That quavering otherworldly music at first seems a comical commentary on the religious devotion with which the girls are instructed to approach the world. (Wait for God to speak, it adds up to.) But as the scenes pass, the theremin emerges as the ingenious embodiment of the erotic mischief unfolding in and around this hotel.
One day, as Amalia watches a musician play the instrument for a crowd, a stranger gently leans his crotch into her back and runs off. She initially looks violated. Then a flash breaks into her expression. Amalia is not merely flattered or turned on -- she's been called. Alche's performance is one of those harder-than-it-looks portrayals of burgeoning sexual awareness that with a less sure actor can seem passive and with one too certain can seem indecent. Alche is alarmingly observant without being remote.
This proves a crucial acting strategy once Amalia discovers that the passive-aggressive crotch belongs to Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso in an anguished performance), one of the doctors staying in her family's hotel for a medical conference. Dr. Jano is an ordinary-looking man probably in his mid-40s. He's married with children. He's respectable and intelligent, and, as such, is clearly, quietly ashamed of what's he's done. But his lewd act awakens carnality in the girl, whose crush turns into an obsession.
Meanwhile, Dr. Jano has begun a flirtation with Amalia's radiant but standoffish mother, Helena (Mercedes Moran), who's still smarting from the news that her ex-husband has fathered twins. While this sounds like material for soap opera, the director is not interested in melodrama. She's an impressionist who has carefully arranged scenes to conjure a sensual but watchful mood. A flirtatious moment between Helena and Dr. Jano at a restaurant is interrupted for a few seconds of girls hosing down a gang of boys in a shower stall, which is followed by a sexy scene of Helena posing to music in her room.
Martel, whose previous film, 2001's ''La Cienaga," was a more thunderous but equally humid family affair, doesn't offer an explanation for most of this. But what the director shows us is so eloquent that the images eventually explain themselves. Amalia watching Dr. Jano through a slit in a drape is a particularly powerful bit of suggestiveness.
''The Holy Girl" is a collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vig-nettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment. A lot of what's in this movie is arbitrary but weird, funny, and -- in a sideways manner -- fleshly and biblical.
Pedro Almodovar is one of the film's producers, and after two movies, Martel has demonstrated a soulfulness that eluded Almodovar until only the last few years. Her random blend of the divine, the profane, and the bizarre is like Luis Bunuel's, but without the satirical harshness.
She's not afraid to make an equation between sexual fervor and religious passion. Like the doomed sisters in Sofia Coppola's ''Virgin Suicides," the girls are inspired to shed their chastity not as an act of rebellion but as a rite of human nature. Where Amalia is able to conflate God and lust, Josefina is conflicted. Their passions are secrets from their parents and provide the source of the film's emotional suspense.
This is also a supreme work of sensation. That medical conference is one for ear, nose, and throat specialists, and the need to touch and the refusal to be touched figure prominently. But the picture has no use for sensationalism, which is why the serene final shot is likely to leave the seduced feeling abandoned. That's how I felt. But what did I want to happen? What more did I want to see?
Days later, I couldn't get ''The Holy Girl" out of my head, and I realized I didn't want a cleaner ending or a more conclusive one. As a testament to the unimposing strength of Martel's storytelling, I didn't want any ending at all.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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