‘Saints’ San Sebastian Review: A Rough-Edged Drama About Crime, Faith and Family

Lali lives far from home in Barcelona and seems to have little contact with whatever is happening back there. One day, while working in a remote area, she gets a phone call with terrible news: her mother is terminally ill and in very poor condition. Lali drops everything and heads home, intending to be there for what appear to be her mother’s final months, perhaps weeks. But once she is back, she needs to find a job, and an unexpected opportunity will take her down a path she could hardly have imagined.

Lali (the much-in-demand Victoria Luengo) is direct and tough, a streetwise woman who seems afraid of neither people nor consequences. Her return and reunion with her mother (Ariadna Gil) reveal a complicated past and a relationship that is hardly warm or easy. But Lali is there to do what she has to do, trying to help her mother even as she struggles to understand her sudden devotion to religion, something she had never shown much interest in before.

Lali also needs to make a living, and a series of strange coincidences lands her in the crew led by Rosario (Eulàlia Ramon), a woman who runs a small operation stealing statues of saints from churches, parishes and local cemeteries and selling them on the black market. Lali turns out to have a knack for the job and quickly becomes part of the gang. Meanwhile, as her mother’s condition deteriorates, Rosario offers to help her… in her own peculiar way.

The Basque-born, Catalonia-based director returns to San Sebastián after the success of his debut feature, Suro, with a film that constantly intertwines a family drama with something closer to a crime story, using religion—or, more precisely, devotion to certain religious symbols—as the unexpected link between the two. More than anything, the film follows Lali as she returns home, sharing her experiences and sensations as she navigates situations that demand something unfamiliar, perhaps even something new, from a woman hardened by life.

Saints works very well as a family drama, establishing an initially abrasive relationship between mother and daughter that gradually begins to reveal other sides and other possibilities. As a crime story, it works too, though it is somewhat less distinctive, piling up a series of episodes —all involving the theft of saints— that feel fairly conventional, rarely escaping the familiar mechanics of stories about thieves and their quiet heists. The music Gurrea uses in these sections, along with a supporting character or two, doesn’t quite measure up to the strength of the film’s central story.

Saints is at its best in the unexpected connections it creates between these two worlds. Rosario is an unusual kind of criminal leader —you’ll see why— and there is something about the way she relates to the people around her that connects spiritually with the kind of crimes she commits. Her apparent religious devotion brings her closer to Lali’s mother and eventually leads her to offer an unlikely form of help. This is where the film subtly connects its more realistic, street-level side with something approaching the mystical, exploring the ways in which one can find expression through the other.

This is very much an actresses’ film, and its three leading women carry it through the moments when it threatens to falter. Luengo plays Lali with clenched teeth and tightly contained suffering, while Gil excels as a physically fragile mother who, in her own way, refuses to surrender quietly to death. But it is the veteran actress of Dispara! —as well as a director herself and the widow of Carlos Saura— who delivers the biggest surprise, playing a woman who, as much as or more than the other two, conceals a deep sensitivity beneath a tough, seemingly impenetrable exterior. Together, the three actresses give Saints its distinctive rough-edged humanity.