For a movie about the child sex trade in Cambodia, Holly is mercifully easy on the stomach. Guy Moshe’s film is shot on location, sometimes in actual brothels, but doesn’t aspire to verisimilitude. Instead, it focuses on the adventure of a 14-year-old Vietnamese girl sold into the sex trade, and an American vagabond and cardsharp named Patrick who wants to save her.

Patrick (a brooding and big-chinned Ron Livingston) is on some relatively harmless black-market trip when his motorcycle breaks down in a dusty Cambodian village where foreigners come to find prostitutes. He waits for his motorcycle to be repaired for a few days and tries to be extra nice to Holly, the new girl, who is obviously not where she is supposed to be. At this point, 30 minutes in, you figure Patrick will find his nerve, throw her on his motorcycle, and they’ll spend the rest of the movie outrunning Cambodian pimps. Maybe he’d even adopt her and everything would be swell. Instead, Patrick ditches her, dithers for a while, wonders if he should go back to get her, then goes back to get her.

Meanwhile, Holly has escaped (with her virginity intact) and takes us on a guided tour of What’s Crappy About Cambodia—she walks a minefield, becomes a garbage picker, and is then sold into another brothel by a helpful policeman. By the time Patrick and Holly find each other, they’re both beyond redemption.

Director Guy Moshe never rubs our faces in the dirt. (And he avoids that other possibility, almost too horrible to consider—making his movie surreptitiously sexy.) But even more than Moshe’s restraint, it’s the deus ex machinas and the sometimes inexplicable behavior of his characters that keep us from being sucked into the horror of his subject matter. The harder the movie is to believe, the easier it is to watch.

HOLLY DIR GUY MOSHE | RATED R | AT EDWARDS LONG BEACH STADIUM 26

Tags: cambodia, Film, Holly, sex tourism