E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dream weavers Local hopefuls make them come true; Lucrecia Martel BY GERALD PEARY
	Related Links Coolidge Corner Movie Theater's official Web site La niña santa/The Holy Girl's official Web site Chris Fujiwara reviews The Holy Girl

Perhaps you have a screenplay you’re readying for production but you still need some polishing and feedback? Your project might qualify for the Screenwriting Salon held monthly at the Coolidge Corner. A script is read aloud by actors, then the paying audience ($8, the regular Coolidge ticket price) critiques what it’s heard and you can think about making changes in the screenplay.

The Screenwriting Salon is the creation of Michael Bowes, a good guy in the Boston movie scene. The Amherst film graduate is an indie producer and chairman of the board at the Brattle Theatre, and he manages Central Productions, co-sponsor of the Salon with Grub Street. A week ago Thursday, I was at the Coolidge for the showcasing of Circuit, which was written by two Mass College of Art film students, Andrew Landauro and Ben Woodard. Their screenplay, which Landauro described as "David Cronenberg meets The Simpsons," is a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream involving shifting characters, the five senses, sci-fi stuff with sinister, glowing pods, and a main character, the master dreamer, who doesn’t appear until two-thirds through. Imaginative. Smart dialogue. But confusing!

"A few less dreams maybe," an audience member suggested when the reading was completed. "Are all those layers necessary? I couldn’t make my way back picking up the bread crumbs."

"Can you explain the pods?" someone asked.

"They cause a sort of ambiguous epidemic, with negative results for everyone," Landauro said. "But mainly they’re there to freak people out!’

"In reading it out loud a second time, it makes more sense," one of the actresses noted. "Even the pods."

"It’s a circular narrative, the beginning is the end, the end is the beginning. The story from the beginning is a dream," Landauro said. "I doubt if anyone got it."

And where does the dream end?

Landauro: "I don’t know."

Woodard: "It kind of folds in on itself."

The two plan to shoot this fall. Their target audience? Fans of Donnie Darko and David Lynch.

THE KEY WEIRD MOMENT in Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa/The Holy Girl, the fine spiritual comedy that’s playing at the Kendall Square, comes when the Catholic schoolgirl heroine, Amalia, finds she’s being rubbed against during a theremin street concert. The man behind the 14-year-old turns out to be a respectable married doctor. Did anything similar happen to Argentine filmmaker Martel, whose films (including her 2001 feature debut, La ciénaga) are set in her home city of Salta? That’s what I asked when I interviewed her at Cannes 2004.

"Nobody with a theremin came to my city," she answered. "But 90 percent of the women in the world have had the experience of a man leaning on them sexually when hearing music. What’s in my film is not exactly what happened to me. While I was watching Blue Velvet in a theater, a man put his hand under my coat, and I turned and faced him. I think a lot of cinephiles are perverted, though not all perverts are cinephiles."

She’s oddly sympathetic to her molester, conjuring the sensibility of Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel. "It would be nice to be a continuation of Buñuel," she said. "Perverts are considered monsters by society, but they have this humanity that I like. Thinking of humankind as made up of monsters is a more interesting idea than that the monster is the exception. The monster is a kind of unpredictable expression of human nature. I’d be interested in him if he were a rapist, or even a murderer. La niña santa is about the futility of representing good and evil. It’s an excellent story to show this."

Was La niña santa influenced by Fritz Lang’s classic M, where Peter Lorre’s pedophile serial killer is the ultimate pervert?

"When I was writing the script, one of my friends insisted I see M," Martel said. "You mention it also, so I must see it soon."

And her intimate, almost religious, close-ups? Did she envision these while watching Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc or the Catholic films of Robert Bresson? "I don’t know the other film, but what really influenced me is Bresson’s Pickpocket, the close-ups of victim and thief. You see in the faces what’s going on, without needing the hands."