Director: Tomás Gómez Bustillo
Writer: Tomás Gómez Bustillo
Stars: Mónica Villa, Horacio Marassi, Iair Said
Synopsis: In a tiny rural village in Argentina, a pious yet insatiably competitive woman discovers that staging a miracle could be her ticket to sainthood. But before doing so, a jarring turn of events illuminates the hidden magic of her world, forcing her to reevaluate everything she once took for granted.
For whatever reason, Rita Lopez (Mónica Villa) is an outcast in her religious community. It’s hardly for lack of trying; she spends her days on her knees, either to pray or to scrub the floors of the chapel. Her competitive tendencies make it difficult for her to accept that she has been permanently excluded from the church’s choir, and that she will never win her pompous priest’s full attention. Her devotion to this aimless cause has drained every ounce of passion from her 40-year marriage to Norberto (Horacio Marassi), a kind man who just wants his wife to watch him fiddle around with a guitar and to indulge his attempts to relive their glory days, all the way down to wearing a pair of yellow ponchos they wore on their honeymoon during dinner. It doesn’t seem to be too much to ask.
But to Rita, anything that won’t aid her unrelenting desire for sainthood is of no use attending to. She’s pushing 70, and despite her displeasure with the lack of appreciation in her daily life, feels that the only recognition even remotely worthwhile would be from a heavenly presence. The timing couldn’t be better, then, when our Rita decloaks what she believes to a long-lost statue of Saint Rita, an artifact believed to have been lost for eternity. Desperate to determine the truth, she ferociously (and anxiously) Googles specifics not only about the statue’s characteristics – to her disappointment, “Santa Rita would never have crown of thorns” – but how one would know if something is a miracle – to which the search engine replies, “If you’re asking, then it’s definitely not a miracle.”
So goes the early comedic tone of Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, a clever debut that dares audiences to ponder what it means to be saintlike, perhaps even to consider whether or not they’re carving out their own shortcuts en route to the holy gates, something Rita makes a habit of in the film’s first act, despite not seeming to be aware of the consequences of her own actions. As you can deduce from her impractically hopeful internet searches, the statue she uncovers in Wandering Saint’s beginning moments is not, in fact, the long-coveted statue of Saint Rita, but she’s willing to fake it ‘til she makes it into God’s good graces. With Norberto’s help – this poor sap will do anything just to spend some quality time with his better half – she smuggles it out of the church’s back room with the intent of ceremoniously unveiling her discovery to her congregation, thus impressing Father Eduardo (Pablo Moseinco) and winning her community’s respect at long last.
That all doesn’t go according to plan is something any viewer could clock from another multiplex entirely, but it’s Bustillo’s execution that sets his film apart, at least in comparison to the array of lesser films that tend to needlessly cram so-called “twists” into their narratives without rhyme or reason as if to say, “Hey, look! We tried reinventing the wheel!” (Succeed, they did not.) Had Bustillo lingered too long on how the characters on Chronicles of a Wandering Saint’s periphery react to this shocker, his movie might have suffered a similar fate, falling into a wasteland of genre-benders that spend too much time justifying their biggest surprises only to fall to bits in the process. Thankfully, he lets things unravel methodically. It’s a welcome approach that, despite veering into over-judicious territory one too many times in its slight 84-minute frame, allows the film to find its tonal footing naturally.
This is not to say that Bustillo – who was awarded the Adam Yauch Hörnblowér Award at last year’s SXSW Festival, given to “a filmmaker whose work strives to be wholly its own, without regard for norms or desire to conform” – doesn’t pulls his fair share of unexpected punches, but they neither distract nor take away from what Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is after. Instead, these jabs drive the film forward while also being sure to land just enough to leave a mark. Nothing is as surprising as when, with 48 minutes remaining, the end credits roll, a stylistic choice that had me both checking my watch and scratching my head one moment, and chuckling the next as the movie abruptly cuts to its next scene.
Needless to say, this is hardly your father’s “faith-based” dramedy. To call it a religion-pilled film at all would be to misdirect, as it’s far more interested in consequence, and how much influence one’s community can have on their identity. But what happens when that community is ripped away from them, or them from it? What about the more intimate relationships that are left behind, specifically those that had been left in the dust long ago due to the primary-positing of other unrelated priorities?
Bustillo’s script mines curiosity from these ideas, some of life’s harshest realities, but the director is especially gifted at framing indelible images to accompany moments that might otherwise be considered mundane. Working with cinematographer Pablo Lozano, Bustillo manages to capture beauty and absurdity in one fell swoop; perhaps the film’s most memorable shot sees Rita praying as a pool of light pours through a church window and surrounds her. Onlookers scoff, assuming that she’s deliberately set up shop in that spot in hopes of appearing as though she’s being touched by God. But for Rita – who Villa plays, remarkably so, as a scatter-brained woman who can’t seem to keep her eyes on the proverbial road long enough to know what is set to hit her in a matter of seconds – it’s another miracle she can’t help but let pass her by in an effort to find the next one, the one that will cross the t’s and dot the i’s on her eventual ascent into heaven.
It’s a shame that Bustillo refuses to let these moments run a bit longer, to let his audience bask in their individual ironies for just a beat more. But there’s plenty of irony in staging them just long enough for the moment we’re yanked away from them to hit home, as though we’re all cartoon characters being pulled off a stage by a cane. To say something similar befalls Rita in Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is selling things short, but to reveal the truth would be ill-suited, considering how focused the film is on how present things (or people) of an unexpected nature can be in our everyday lives. If only we were all able to pause life for a time in order to take stock of what we miss when we are so hell-bent on achieving one thing and one thing only. Ferris Bueller would approve.
