Lucrecia Martel’s follow-up to her promising 2001 debut La Cienaga concerns ripe young thing Amalia (the amazing Maria Alche) whose Catholic education results in an in inevitable and rather unfortunate conflation of biological and religious imperatives. Mesmerized by a street performer who is ­ not unimportantly ­ stationed behind a theremin (a device utilizing invisible, intangible vibrations) 14-year old Amalia gets groped by a lonely grown-up. This middle-aged man, a doctor named Jano (Carlos Belloso), is the film’s symbol of perpetual male horn-doggery. He honestly can’t help himself ­ which is where Amalia comes in.

His bad touch puts butterflies in her stomach, but she’s got Jesus on the brain: God has offered this stooped, bespectacled molester as a reclamation project. She resolves to save him, and wreaks blithe havoc on the lives of those around her in the process. This gorgeously distended screwball comedy is as preoccupied with flesh as La Cienaga, which was so vivid in its evocations of dog-day languor that I found myself swatting at imaginary flies in the movie theatre. Martel’s got a Claire Denis-like knack for wringing subtext from the napes of necks, gently splayed torsos, or closely observed earlobes. Try as she might, our earnest destroyer-heroine can’t quite put words around her emerging desires. But as framed by Martel and veteran cinematographer Felix Monti, her body language becomes positively loquacious.