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Plenty of directors have used hair-raising humanitarian travesties as content, background, or inspiration for their films, and in general, their art tends to take precedent over their message. In that sense, Holly is a film with an identity crisis, walking a much finer line between entertainment and a public awareness campaign.
Director Guy Moshe tells the story of a 12-year-old Vietnamese girl sold into one of Cambodia’s mafia-run child prostitution rings. This is the fictional lens for the country’s very real sex trade, but plot details seem like only an afterthought. The essence of the film, and its only claim to success, is that it was shot on location with many non-actor locals in the real brothels of Svay Pak, a now-disbanded red-light district 11 kilometers outside of Phnom Penh. And while it strives both for cinematic poetry and hard-hitting muckraking, Holly’s documentary alter-ego is by far the stronger.
Ron Livingston plays Patrick, a burnt-out American expat who has lingered at Southeast Asia’s dingy poker tables for too many years. An alcoholic who deals in stolen goods, Patrick isn’t exactly on a Peace Corps mission. But when his leaky motorbike breaks down in a red-light village where toddlers offer sex for five dollars, our jaded protagonist wakes up from his moral coma. Patrick’s distress specifically focuses on Holly (newcomer Thuy Nguyen), a recently acquired virgin whose suffering is neatly hidden in a puckered face and vaguely longing eyes. Through cautious gifts of soup and kindness, Patrick slowly earns her trust and loses his detachment. Of course, now he must save her, at any cost.
Unfortunately, the plaintive storyline and woeful images of contemporary Cambodia (minefields, children digging through garbage dumps) are not enough to propel this movie. Attempting to remain understated in deference to the weighty subject matter, Moshe and scriptwriter Guy Jacobson may have overshot subtlety and landed in boring. Beyond the expected response to seeing pre-pubescent prostitution, the film fails to plumb the emotional depth of its characters and capacity of its viewers – which the devastating topic could have easily achieved without any Hollywood tear-jerking tactics.
Holly amounts to a survey of a loathsome industry colored by a weak script and a listless cast. Still, with perhaps tens of thousands of child
sex slaves in Cambodia today, it is a relevant film with an unambiguous moral.
Yana Litovsky
November 9, 2007
