El Tonto Por Cristo

Sinners, saints, and fools... in Texas

The first shot of El Tonto Por Cristo, a new independent feature from Texas filmmaker Josh David Jordan, is like a gateway: a threshold between our world and the film’s. Framed from the perspective of an Orthodox monastery’s front doors, the viewer is plunged into an eight-minute unbroken composition of a field, a few laboring monks, and a briefcase-bearing man picking his way through them toward the monastery, the rhythmic motions of the monks and the lush buzzing of a southwestern summer forming a swoony backdrop to his hesitant advance. He is looking for the abbot, Father John (Matthew Posey) – his long-lost brother, as it turns out – but throughout their meeting at the monastery gate, his contemporary clothing and sorrowful character contrast sharply with the severe serenity of his surroundings; against the otherworldiness of the scene, he is like a voyager on the boundary of an alien world, and we along with him.

The effect of this extended composition is calculated, such that the first cut, when it comes, feels apocalyptic: the viewer has already, if he has allowed the film to go to work on him, begun assimilating to this peculiar, unearthly world populated only by fools and holy men. This world is where the entirety of El Tonto Por Cristo will unfold: strange, seemingly unmoved by time, weighted with mystery, both oppressive and free. If there are tensions or contradictions here, their resolution is not a concern of the film; if anything, the opposite is true. Like the great works of transcendental cinema in whose tradition it attempts to follow – The Seventh Seal, Ordet, Andrei Rublev, the 60 Minutes Mount Athos special – El Tonto Por Cristo is as much a space for the viewer to inhabit as it is a conventional film. Prior to the screening I attended on its roadshow tour, Jordan and his wife Jessica introduced it as such: “This will ask something from you,” they advised.

Any attempt at homage brings with it the danger of redundancy. Plenty of films aspire to the aesthetic tempo and insight of the masters to whom Jordan confesses his project is indebted, but his sets itself apart and rarely loses its voice. El Tonto Por Cristo unfolds through languid vignettes that capture both the slow mundanity of monastic life and the ruptures of spiritual intensity that, it is said, follow in the wake of the holy. This seeming dichotomy is the crux of the film: the mystery of how such extremes can exist in close proximity, and perhaps may only exist in such proximity. While watching the film, we are invited to inhabit it as a place where the material and spiritual realms are in fact always connected, interacting, and mutually influential, where the daily toil of harvests, prayer, and crises of faith are accompanied by midnight exorcisms and miraculous healings. It is, in a word, alien. While the assembly of characters who populate it are endearingly human in their foibles and failures, the higher folly of all their lives as they struggle toward sainthood nonetheless fill the screen with a presence that is not of this world.

The film orbits around Father John, but other figures weave through the episodes. Brother Seraphim (Kenny Bingham) shirks his duties to drink wine and nap in the stable, but paints icons with a master’s hand. Brother Ambrose (Jordan Walker Ross) is a kindhearted monk whose piety battles against youthful impatience. In an early scene, he shares with Brother Genesius (Frank Mosely) that years ago, when a holy man at his former monastery reposed, many said his body smelled of flowers. This story torments him, though, since – accounting for it by his perceived lack of faith – he was not among them. Genesius carries doubts of his own. He left behind a life that comes into sharper clarity as the film progresses, and commands some of its most daring scenes. These add an additional reading to the film’s title, or rather invites the addition of a surprising breadth to the expected meaning.

Maybe my favorite passage in the film is an extended visit from Archbishop Maximus (Max Hartman). Grand, self-possessed, and vain, he conducts the liturgy, dines on the monastery food and wine with relish, and, one night in his chambers, delivers morbidly grandiose Shakespearean soliloquies to his own reflection. This indulgence is shattered by Father John’s sudden appearance in the mirror, who cautions his superior with a spectral and terrible authority that all is vanity. He vanishes as soon as he appears, thunder crashing outside; when the archbishop hurries to Father John’s cell, he finds him fast asleep in his chair. Was it merely an apparition? If so, the ‘merely’ is misplaced; in this place ghosts may convict and visions draw blood. What follows between the pair is superficially amusing, but on a deeper level the development of their relationship in the wake of this incident is very profound, and one of many instances in which Jordan depicts the trappings of religious custom in a way that illuminates the bright and divine core of what they point to.

Whatever number of characters the film attends to, though, it invariably returns to Father John. While the dearth of narrative details make this a difficult film to ‘spoil,’ it does seem ungenerous to elaborate on why this is ultimately the case. I think it’s enough to observe that, whether he is strictly present in a given scene or not, it seems that his eyes are the ones through which the viewer is encouraged by the filmmakers to look. These eyes look upon the world and, seeing it and at the same time seeing through it, feast upon an otherwise invisible splendor. They are often full of tears, either from laughter or weeping, and on occasion it is difficult to tell the difference. He is single-minded in his daily task – “Making room,” he says elliptically to Brother Genesius, ordering a cabinet inexplicably full of human skulls – of readying himself body and soul for death, which in its repudiation of life receives it back in apparent overabundance. Father John, and the film itself, seem to engage their world in such a way that the smallest moments appear to contain an indispensable significance: a delayed arrival for morning prayer births an almost unobserved miracle; a practical joke lands the sleeping abbot in a shallow grave from which he ‘resurrects’, roaring with laughter; a monk throws back a covering to reveal carefully sewn angel wings for a local girl. For those foolish enough to see them, perhaps our world, too, contains such splendid secrets.