A Story I Loved: Chronicles of a Wandering Saint
Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s strange and tender first feature, is about miracles. Rather than asking if the miraculous can exist in an ordinary world, however, Bustillo examines almost the opposite possibility: that miracles may be everywhere in ordinary life, and are only obscured by our own unwillingness to notice them.
Rita Lopez, our film’s main character, doesn’t seem particularly miraculous. She’s old, stubborn, devoutly Catholic, and spends much of her time cleaning a small church in rural Argentina, quietly resenting the other women who work there. Her faith, though sincere, has also become entangled with vanity. She wants to be good, certainly, but perhaps more desperately she wants to be known as good. So, when she discovers an abandoned statue in the church, then, realizing that, with some cosmetic alterations, it might pass for a long-lost statue of Santa Rita, she decides to take a shot at finally becoming someone she believes is worth remembering. The discovery would be a miracle, and Rita would be the woman through whom that miracle had been revealed- a kind of significance she so desperately wants. She recruits her husband, Norberto, into the scheme, and her initial ideas for deception snowball into an increasingly elaborate fraud.
Though the idea is ridiculous, it never feels that the film is trying to make Rita seem so. Her desire is easy to understand, after all- she wants proof that her life has been significant; to somehow leave evidence behind of her existence. Sainthood, or even some degree of proximity to it, offers her a way of making her “small” life feel larger. The irony, of course, is that significance is all around her: in her marriage, her home, the repetitive rhythms of a life shared with another person, there is an abundance of meaning. Her husband, Norberto, seems to understand this more instinctively. He is more concerned with Rita than their plan, continually trying to restore some intimacy to their marriage instead, whether by playing music for her or recreating memories from their younger years. At one point, watching clothes moving on a line, swaying gently in the wind, he says that they are dancing. Rita dismisses him, impatient with the observation and occupied with her search for much grander miraculous things. Rita, who believes more fervently in God, is somehow the one less capable of believing in wonder.
Then, Rita dies. The movie ends briefly with her, rolling its credits before opening unexpectedly into the second half of the film, where she now finds herself in the afterlife. Just like the life she left behind, the place is incredibly bureaucratic and mundane, falling far short of the grandeur she had spent her life imagining, praying towards. In this strange limbo, Rita is forced into the role of a spectator of the physical world, watching it continue on without her and rediscovering, bit by bit, the value of everything that once seemed so ordinary. The things she never cared much for, that she can now no longer touch-food, her home, her grieving husband-are now charged with a nearly unbearable sort of beauty.
I really enjoyed this movie. I don’t usually gravitate toward magical realism, but this movie uses it really beautifully. The supernatural does not really enlarge the world so much as make the existing world newly beautiful- Bustillo’s fantastical imagery is beautiful, but the movie redirects our attention away from the spectacle and toward the little happenings of our ordinary world. The domesticity of Rita’s home, aging bodies moving through their familiar routines, laundry shifting in the wind, meals, music- all become part of the movie’s vocabulary of wonder. Weaving fantasy into an extremely mundane setting, Bustillo makes reality a truly miraculous thing.
As cliche as it is to say, we really don’t appreciate things until they’re gone. It’s a common theme in all our lives. The particular cruelty of being human is that so much is visible in retrospect- with every new year comes a new bout of nostalgia. I think this is something I want to draw more consciously on for my own writing: I also enjoy working with physically “impossible” things, but this movie has reminded me that I should also weigh the truth behind them- unreality can be most effective when it doesn’t pull away from “real” life, instead drawing attention to the ordinary things in the world. Rita’s death provides a change in vantage point: once she is removed from the real world, she sees that the tiny things that were dispersed throughout her seemingly mundane life are what truly come together to make meaning.
