As the AI winter draws near, we must refuse to let any chance slip by to awaken our numbed senses. That means staying alert, at every moment, to welcome any sign. And a true labor of love is always one of those gifts that life, sometimes, brings when you are ready to receive them. That’s what a strange, luminous film projected at the Kennedy Center did for me a few days ago. Directed by David Josh Jordan, the movie is entitled El Tonto Por Cristo, which means “The Fool for Christ.”
What signs are we seeking? C.S. Lewis, I think, captured it best in his dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a parable about the birth of artificial intelligence and the technocratic order that paves its way. In the story, the protagonist Mark, an ambitious academic, is drawn into an elite institute called N.I.C.E., whose demonic aims are cloaked in the language of “objectivity,” a preparation for the arrival of superior beings.
As part of his initiation, Mark is confined to a room deliberately ill-proportioned, “not grotesquely so, but sufficiently to produce dislike,” hung with paintings that at first seem ordinary, yet on closer inspection reveal “unaccountable details” that make each one “look like something seen in delirium:” an odd tilt of a foot, a strange grouping of fingers, too many beetles beneath the table at the Last Supper, a strange figure between Christ and the Lazarus. Doesn’t this remind you of some AI-generated images?
Instead of breaking him, the room has the opposite effect. Against its sour crookedness there rises, Lewis writes, “some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight.” A sense of something else, “the Normal,” that is “solid, massive, with a shape of its own,” something “you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with.” Mark is “not yet thinking in moral categories, yet he is having his first deeply moral experience: he is choosing a side.”
We live inside that same crooked room. The world around us is bent, and the question is always the same: where is the Normal to be found?
El Tonto Por Cristo answers that question with quiet, stubborn grace. In the short introduction before the screening, Jordan described how the film came to be. Scrolling through the internet in search of a movie that might weave together Orthodox Christianity and the wild, strange beauty of Texas in the tradition of Bergman, Dreyer, and Tarkovsky, he was stopped by his wife: “Why don’t you just make it?” So he did, with an investment of $36,000.
The film unfolds in an Orthodox monastery on the Texas coast. At its center is Father John, the one-eyed, divinely illumined abbot of a ragged band of misfit monks seeking sanctity in this improbable place. Every character is drawn from the lives of real Orthodox saints, those wild, desert fathers who have always been Christianity’s most compelling witnesses.
For two hours and fifteen minutes we are drawn into the intimate, ordinary-yet-radiant rhythm of their days. The film never spells out what brought these men together, but it is unmistakable: each carries the scars of deep pain, each was an outcast before the monastery became home. What it does show, with extraordinary patience, is how the monotony of monastic life and the fire of spiritual intensity are not opposites, but the same reality seen from different angles, how Heaven and Earth dwell together in the same small room.
The title points to the heart of the matter: the holy fool, a figure central to Orthodox tradition and to Dostoevsky, among other Slavic artists. As Jonathan Pageau explains, the holy fool exposes the limits of our tidy order. He turns everything upside down so that we might see the way out. The Holy Fool inverts the script until the Normal becomes visible again.
El Tonto Por Cristo performs this inversion with rare subtlety. The opening eight-minute take alone is a threshold: we stand at the monastery door with Father John, his back to us, facing a man in a briefcase and Texas tie, whom we learn is Father John’s long-lost brother. The man comes to make him sign away an inheritance and to hand him a medallion bearing the faces of their dead parents. In the background, monks move about their tasks in ways that make no worldly sense. The scene is a quiet passage from our own crooked world into the realm of holy foolishness.
Shot in black-and-white to evoke the European cinema the director loves, the film lets the liturgy wash over us in hypnotic, colorless richness. The same austere palette somehow makes the strange beauty of the Texas landscape both more alien and more familiar, even to a European eye. It is art in the plainest, most essential sense.
At the film’s center, like the hub of a turning wheel, is a wordless dance in the silent chapel. Monk Genesius moves through the entire spectrum of human emotion, from ecstasy to despair to death, until he meets the gaze of Christ. Father John enters, watches in silence, and leaves. The contrast between the holy fool’s wild mime and the sacred stillness of the space, between carnival inversion and the feast that always follows, is breathtaking.
The outside world appears too, in parishioners who entrust their children to the abbot, who come seeking his blessing to be made whole again. These glimpses remind us that the monastery is not an escape but a different way of being in the world.
The film is demanding, in the sense that it does not hand you everything, but at no point does it grow pretentious, which is a difficult balance to observe for so contemplative a work. It is also often very funny in a Dionysian way. In one of the funniest moments, an archbishop stays momentarily at the monastery, arriving in a vehicle with the word “Bishop” on the vanity plates. Alone in his bedroom, the archbishop recites Shakespeare in a grandiose manner and is caught when the image of Father John appears in the mirror, reminding him that all is vanity.
It is also beautifully inclusive. Though steeped in Orthodoxy, it requires no prior initiation, and it is not preachy. You do not have to be a theologian to be moved. Like Tarkovsky at his best, the beauty here is generous, radiant, unforced. It is not a “Christian film.” It is simply art—art that happens to be soaked in the light of Christ.
In a time when so much feels bent and artificial, El Tonto Por Cristo offers something solid, something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It shows us the Normal again. And in doing so, it becomes one of those rare signs we were waiting for.
If you want to watch El Tonto Por Cristo, the movie will be shown in various places in the US in March, April, and May, so check here for showings and book your tickets.
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