‘Citizen Saint’ Review: A Nightmarishly Handsome Allegory for the Destructive Power of Faith
Jessica Kiang There is an old joke about a pious man stranded on a desert island. As he prays for divine deliverance, a ship arrives, but he sends it away, saying, “God will save me.” Ditto a helicopter and eventually a seaplane. The man dies, to his surprise, and when he gets to heaven, asks God why he did not save him. God replies, “Look, man, I sent a ship, a helicopter and a seaplane…” If the moral of this old chestnut were hewn from the craggy quarries of a benighted Georgian mining village, and carved in strikingly gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, it might look a little like “Citizen Saint,” Tinatin Kajrishvili’s somber, scabrous third film, in which a rural community refuses to accept a God who moves in anything but the most mysterious ways.