Tag Along With Chronicles of a Wandering Saint For Metaphysical Comedy
Writer/director Tomás Gómez Bustillo opens his feature debut, the spritely Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, with a low-key jab at piety: A woman kneels praying in a church pew, bathed in sunlight that peeks in through the windows. When the light shifts ever so slightly to her left, she scooches over, surreptitious as can be, to avoid notice from her fellow churchgoers and give the appearance that the light is following her rather than the other way around.
The woman is Rita (Mónica Villa), a woman of genuine devotion nonetheless compelled by a godliness complex. Rita is to worship as Daniel Plainview is to oil: She wants no one else to succeed. It’s a strange and self-contradicting quirk: Faking piety should theoretically bar one from entry into God’s kingdom. Rita, for her supposed meekness, is as vain as her faith is true; it’s a testament to the complications of spiritual belief that the two coexist within her without snapping her brain. Humans are, after all, imperfect, and committing to religious practice has a way of throwing our imperfections into sharp relief. If we adhere to dogma, we’re setting an expectation that we stick to its guidelines and rules.
Chronicles of a Wandering Saint maintains unflagging awareness of what it means to believe, and to worship and, maybe most of all, to hope. It’s one thing to have faith; it’s another to live a whole life without seeing your faith rewarded. Bustillo extends a great deal of sympathy to Rita, who aches to see a miracle in her lifetime – even if that means staging one, which clangs hard against at least two of the Ten Commandments. When Rita uncovers what she thinks is the long-ago-vanished statue of Rita of Cascia, she sneaks it back to her house, her long-suffering husband Norberto (Horacio Marassi) in tow; later, she asks Father Eduardo (Pablo Moseinco) for his take on whether or not it’s a sign. He tells her it’s a miracle. It isn’t, of course; it’s a terrible fabrication. But that won’t stop Rita from convincing her friends and neighbors otherwise.
The consequences of her scam lead the story to what may well be the single greatest bit of misdirection any filmmaker has attempted in the cinema of the 2020s, pivoting into territory tinged with magical realism from Latin American tradition. Poor Rita gets what she’s long sought: Faith rewarded. But Bustillo focuses on the cost of her search instead of simply basking in its closure, effectively splitting Chronicles of a Wandering Saint into two distinct but intrinsically connected halves. The film poses complex questions about the end goal of faith, and what it means to be faced with the very thing faith navigates us toward, further knotted up by the options for faith’s ultimate realization: Afterlife or Earth, ascend or remain.