la niña santa (w&d lucrecia martel, w. juan pablo domenech)

Last year Lucrecia Martel came to Montevideo and screened a short she had made during the pandemic. It was a twenty minute short about her life in the north of Argentina. Afterwards, her partner, a singer, did a set. There were questions and answers, many of them about Woody Allen, whose season in Cinemateca was ongoing. It was a slightly dispiriting affair, none of which felt like it had all that much to do with her four feature films, all of which I have seen at one point or another. So I returned to Niña Santa, a film I haven’t watched since it came out, nearly twenty years ago, uncertain of what to expect. Would it live up to the memories, or would it prove as underwhelming as the night in the Zitarossa?

Thankfully, it was the former. Martel has only made four films and they are all small masterpieces. La Niña Santa is a waspish, delicate, pitch perfect film. Martel has talked a lot about the importance of sound. The film opens with girls singing. A recurring motif is the playing of a theremin, the setting for the initial contact physical contact between Amalia and the doctor. Martel explores the balance of power between Amalia and the doctor, pursuing a contentious line which suggests, perhaps, that the weaker party is in part complicit in events. It’s a film which has some affinity with Harrower’s Blackbird, not to mention Lolita, dramatic works which are prepared to go beyond the obvious tropes of blame in their investigation of teenage sexuality and the way adults manipulate or find themselves beholden to this.

There isn’t time or inclination on the part of the reviewer to go into the ethical dimensions of the film, buy him a drink and it can be discussed to the small hours. On an aesthetic level., however there is time to note Martel’s flawless composition and almost too perfect shot selection. Every shot is beautifully set up. The location is a hotel, with the film only occasionally venturing out into the street. Yet Martel makes this hotel into a small town. Secondary characters are allowed to steal the scene, (the maid with the spray and the bad timing offers the kind of comic touch which belies the film’s seemingly serious nature), and the action of the hotel is always humming in the background. The director succeeds in giving the impression that the whole wide world is contained within the hotel’s walls. Lastly, it’s worth noting the sublime pacing of the film, as it seems to pick up pace and accelerate, acquiring more and more dramatic tension as it heads towards its baleful climax.

Let’s hope Martel hasn’t gone to ground altogether in Northern Argentina, and that her fifth feature film is in the pipeline and coming soon.