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| First Reformed |
Paul Schrader's First Reformed is an overwrought update of Bergman's Winter Light with climate change replacing Godless Communism as the modern day bugaboo. A little Diary of a Country Priest is thrown in for good measure. Nevertheless, First Reformed is Schrader's most successful film since Affliction. Schrader coaxes fine performances from Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Victoria Hill and Cedric the Entertainer. He captures the torment of modern life amidst the silence of God, much like Bergman did, but feels the need to provide a transcendent and cathartic ending which Bergman wisely avoided. Schrader's angry man of God is redeemed, but we can see the Deus ex Machina coming from miles away.
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| Winter Light |
Another religious film which more successfully balances its themes through its use of ambivalence is Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl, from 2004. Amalia is a teenager who lives in a hotel where her mother, Helena, works. Amalia is wrestling with sexual and spiritual issues and Martel captures well the conflicted hysteria of adolescents. Amalia's relationship with her best friend, Josefina, is one of those passionate teenage friendships that teeter on the conjugal, a marriage in all but name before the onslaught of heterosexual courtship, much like that of Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It. The claustrophobia of the hotel settings in The Holy Girl is foregrounded as moments of intimacy are often stolen ones.
A conference of ENT doctors has filled the hotel making things even more crowded. One Dr. Jano draws the attention of Helena and Amalia, who he furtively gropes. Martel pictures all her characters as both hemmed in by circumstance and their own tunnel vision. Jano is both perpetrator and victim, unsympathetic, but not evil incarnate. All relationships here are broken or askew. Just below the level of Martel's masterpieces, The Headless Woman and Zama, but only just. (9/18/18)
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| The Holy Girl |
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