Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s debut feature has all of the hallmarks of a mid-aughts indie: a mid-runtime credits sequence, quirky costume design, and dialogue that’s delivered in between long silences and sudden stutters. Yet, because all of the things are presented in a tired fashion—as if they have been dragged into 2024 afters years of overuse—Bustillo actually manages to expose how the imaginative thinking that made independent film synonymous with quirkiness throughout the aughts has affected unorthodox approaches to art direction and playful narrative gambits, while also breathing new life into these very aesthetic strategies. Chronicles of a Wandering Saint (2024), in spite of its narrative contrivances and mindless characters, is a charming little film that demonstrates a keen awareness of its genre alongside some genuinely inspired comedic sequences.
The film, as previously detailed, is split in two. Its first half is dedicated to scenes of everyday drudgery in the life of Rita Lopez (Mónica Villa), who devotionally cleans her local church day in and day out, while its second half is consumed by a vision of a bureaucratized afterlife where angels deliver the recently deceased with news of their ascension to heaven as though they were delivering a UPS package that requires a signature. It’s a very Catholic film that—like the religion’s view on metaphysics—partitions its worldview between the material toil of this life and the mysterious, but assuredly, or at least expectedly, sublime—if not simply surprising—elements of the next one. But, because it is a contemporary film about Catholicism—which is to say, it was made at a time when the moral authority of the church is null among most artists and thinking-people, except those with fascist fantasies or a desperate need for ritual—its representation of the afterlife and Catholic customs is parodic.
Bustillo plays the sacredness of canonization, as well as the divine status of angels and saints, for laughs by likening the afterlife’s internal processes to commercial ones; in his view, angels are mere couriers, ghosts are simply waiting to be called up like patients at a doctor’s office, and ascension is just a fancy way of denoting a final series of rituals demanded of God before stepping into his kingdom. Unlike the religion’s worldview on metaphysics, Bustillo suggests that there’s a sublime quality to this life—however tedious it may seem at times—and that there might be an insufferable material cost to the next one, if there even is a next life.
Chronicles of a Wandering Saint screens this evening, July 4, and until next week, at IFC.
