On demand: "Keeper of Promises/The Promise/The Given Word/O Pagador de Promessas"

Should you seek a cinematic example of the difficulties of interpreting the godly Word, look no further than the multiple English-language titles accumulated by 1962's Keeper of Promises, a striking Brazilian Palme d'Or-winner that offers a Biblical parable shot like a Western, a noir, even a musical. It opens with a hunched figure staggering out of the desert and into the heart of the modern city, carrying a vast wooden cross on his back. He's not the Messiah, as it turns out, but Zé (Leonardo Villar), a farmer who's made a promise to St. Barbara to fashion and transport this burden to a cathedral so as to guarantee the life of his ailing pet donkey. Writer-director Anselmo Duarte quickly develops and complicates this metaphor. The cathedral, when our pilgrim finally arrives in the early hours, is closed. Zé alienates his doubting wife Rosa (Glória Menezes), who reckons it'd be fine just to leave the cross outside, by insisting on delivering the item personally; the pair are contrasted with another couple they encounter on the city's shadier backstreets, namely a white-suited pimp who goes by the ironic name of Bonitao (Geraldo del Rey), introduced leering at Rosa from a doorway, and his prize girl Marly (Norma Bengell), who presumably serves as this parable's own Mary Magdalene. Set against the squeaky-clean visions of 21st century faith movies, the whole proves surprisingly earthy: lust comes into play early on, cowshit gets proffered as a cure for a head wound, and it all builds towards a catfight and a colossal punch-up. Songs of Praise this is not.

Most intriguingly of all, the forbidding strictures of organised religion are persistently critiqued. The movie opens and closes with a Candomblé ceremony - the dancing and chanting of Brazil's indigenous Black population - which the cathedral's father (very) superior denounces as pure devilry, shortly before he accuses Zé of blasphemy and tells him to stick his cross where the sun don't shine. In an Ace in the Hole-ish subplot, the pilgrim's plight attracts the attention of a cynical newspaperman whose editor tells him "we don't want good articles, we want profitable articles" (a line that leaps across time, if ever there was) and dubs Zé the new Christ. A simple pilgrimage thus becomes a properly thorny, not exclusively ecumenical matter, and the film describing it bends into fascinating new shapes: Kafka if he were more concerned with the spiritual than the bureaucratic, Buñuel without the self-amused sniggering, an Ealing comedy in a far warmer climate. As Zé is forced to lug the cross up and down the church steps, his progress assisted and checked by not just the priest but his congregation, local businessmen and a passing capoeira squad, we get much the same feel for a situation and a community as we did in an earlier Cannes triumph, 1959's Black Orpheus: for an hour and a half, these steps in front of this church seem absolutely the place to be. Did this spectacle inspire Pasolini and Bresson to fashion their own modern passion plays? (At points, I wondered whether it even factored into Eastwood's High Plains Drifter a decade later.) Funny, involving, visually acute, not to mention as playful as a checkers set, Keeper of Promises obviously puts today's faith-based cinema to shame. Real grace is somewhere in these bustling frames; Duarte challenges the viewer to find it.

Keeper of Promises is now streaming on YouTube.