Since none of us really has the concrete truth about what happens after we die, the movies have given us a vast amount of space to roam around in our imagination of the afterlife and, especially, the immediate moments following our deaths. Chronicles of a Wandering Saint begins with Rita, an older woman who lives in a small village in Argentina, who’s deeply religiously devoted, and also maybe kind of annoying to some of the other women in her town. When she finds a statue in a back room of her church, she decides this has to be the long-lost statue of Santa Rita that everyone presumed was gone forever. Further, she decides she’s going to stage a miracle, having Santa Rita appear seemingly out of nowhere in her church, which she figures will cause everyone in town to shower her with praise. Or something. Rita likes attention.
She enlists the help of her husband, who is sweet, but with whom she’s clearly bored. And then things take a very sharp turn, and Rita’s whole world is upended. And here is where the film truly begins to glow. We move from what seemed like a gentle satire into a story that’s much more contemplative and dotted with surprising and wry humor. At the point we’re entirely using our imagination, everything can be as strange or unexpected as we want it to be, and the movie’s first-time feature director, Tomás Gómez Bustillo, periodically pokes us from unpredictable angles, making us laugh, or at least smile, while Rita begins to take a much wider view of her life, her husband, and every person’s humanity.
There are times when what Bustillo is doing feels a little forced, although a lot of that is in the earlier part of the film, and may be somewhat by design. But the magic of what he does is in making us reflect on our own lives, and in making us feel: about the grand art of living, about what we take for granted, and about what we’ll leave behind.
Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is on VOD.
