7 - Masculinity, Desire and Performance in The Holy Girl

Summary

After finishing their catechism lessons, Amalia and her friends take a walk around the small Salta town they live in. They usually stop by the storefront of a shop in which a musician demonstrates a theremin, a Russian instrument which works through electromagnetic waves. People crowd the pavement before what appears to be a miracle: an instrument which produces sounds not through contact, but through the movements of the player's hands. This scene before the music store happens three times in Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl/La niña santa (2004). In two of them, we see sexual harassment or what we could call, for lack of an established concept, the apoyada. During the first scene, Dr Jano − who is in town to take part in a professional congress − approaches Amalia from behind and presses himself against her. The teenager is frozen, and the aggressor runs away when she turns to look at his face. Amalia, who is just out of her catechism lessons, sees this event as part of a divine plan involving her and this stranger, whom she will later identify as Jano. The second time they meet on the pavement, Amalia takes the initiative and stands before Jano for him to repeat the action. She also tries to touch his hand, and when he pulls it away, scared, she immediately turns to look at him. Jano escapes again. He does not know yet that Amalia is the daughter of Helena, the owner of the hotel he is staying at, whom he is trying to seduce. Jano is also unaware that Amalia believes they are both part of that ‘divine plan’, which she refers to as ‘the calling’ after the topic they are covering in her catechism lessons.

Sexual harassment in public spaces is a rather frequent occurrence and has a prominent role in discussions of gender-based violence. It is evident that it bears a significant material and symbolic weight for Lucrecia Martel: the first scene in her first film (the 1995 short feature Dead King/Rey Muerto) opens with three characters sitting at a bar table, under a Rambo poster, and watching journalist Silvia Fernández Barrio on TV.