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Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, the remarkable debut feature film from writer-director Tomás Gómez Bustillo, opens with a prayer. The woman whispering it is Rita (Mónica Villa), the elderly custodian at a rural Argentine church. As she kneels in the first pew, clutching her rosary beads, white sunlight spills in through an open door, illuminating her like a Renaissance painting.
Later, Rita overhears a couple of her church frenemies, who stumbled upon her as she prayed, cast doubt over the authenticity of the scene. “You think the light just happened to hit her that way?” one woman mutters behind a closed door. It’s a ridiculous accusation—except for the fact that it’s true. When the sunlight illuminating her started to migrate, Rita paused mid-prayer, shimmied to her left to catch it, and resumed just in time for her onlookers to arrive.
Miracles that require a bit of manufacturing are a recurring theme in Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, a delightful, moving tale about one woman’s obsession with living—and appearing to live—as piously as possible.
Rita is constantly cleaning and praying, but she can’t secure the attention she wants from her church’s flighty priest (Pablo Moseinco), who is always running late for his next service. That is until, rummaging through the church’s storage room one day, she finds her lottery ticket of sorts: a statue of Santa Rita, the namesake of both Rita and her small village, which has supposedly been missing for decades. It might be a miracle.
Rita enlists the help of her doting husband Norberto (an easy to love Horacio Marassi), but he forgets to bring the car, leading to an amusing sequence where the couple walks home under the sweltering sun, the boxed statue hoisted onto their shoulders. At home, looking to revive a spark in their relationship, Norberto dusts off the yellow raincoats they wore on their honeymoon to Iguazú Falls, and suggests they visit the grandiose waterfalls again. Rita shrugs him off and reminds him that the waterfalls are exactly the same. “But we’re not,” he quips back.
Norberto is full of such romantic gestures and nuggets of wisdom, but they mostly go ignored by Rita, who becomes wholly consumed by the rediscovered statue. One evening, she falls down a Google rabbithole (which includes a stop on wikiHow’s “What to Do if You Experience a Miracle” page) and realizes the artifact she found might not be as miraculous as she thought. “If you want it to be a miracle, then it is,” Norberto advises her, opening the door for the pair to perform ethically dubious rehabilitation surgery on the statue.
Chronicles is explicitly about Catholicism, but at a major turning point about a third of the way into the film, it begins to draw upon another Latin American tradition: magical realism—the kind pioneered by writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. With an unforgettable needle drop, Chronicles sheds its gentle, quotidian exterior and becomes a fantastical ode to life and death, roping in mischievous devils on motorcycles, sneezing fits with spiritual undertones, and premium packages to heaven that come with terms and conditions.
Villa, an Argentine legend lauded for her work in cult classics such as Waiting for the Hearse (1985) and Wild Tales (2014), is a brilliant anchor for this reverie. With the slightest change of expression, she conveys a lifetime of jealousy or an overwhelming feeling of hope. The second star of Chronicles is arguably its director of photography, Pablo Lozano, along with the film’s production designer, editor, and whoever else is responsible for making it glow like a Caravaggio.
That whoever else, of course, includes Bustillo, the Buenos Aires-born, AFI-trained young writer-director at the helm of this magnificent debut. With Chronicles, he proves to possess both a wild, playful imagination, and the tricky ability to translate that imagination into something intelligible and accessible.
A great irony lies at the center of Rita’s tale: Her quest to stage a miracle has blinded her to all the little miracles that she doesn’t need to force, like the gushing waterfalls at Iguazú, or her husband, who plants a gentle kiss on her cheek every time he gets home from his night shift. Too concerned with what awaits her up in the sky, she forgot to stop and smell the roses here on Earth. Don’t worry—by the end of Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, she gets a powerful reminder. You will, too.
Chronicles of a Wandering Saint screens at 5 p.m. on Sept. 24 and at 9:10 p.m. on Sept. 26 at AFI Silver’s Latin American Film Festival, featuring a Q&A with filmmaker Tomás Gómez Bustillo and producer Gewan Brown on the 24th. silver.afi.com. $15
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