Divinas Palabras (1987) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

I have about as much chance of understanding this film as I do of understanding Krapp's Last Tape or Finnegan's Wake or Dr Hawking's History of Time. I admit that part of my confusion stems from the fact that it is in Spanish without English subtitles, but I really don't think I could have made any sense of it in English either.

I do know that it possesses all the required ingredients of pretentious European cinema:

1. Villagers carrying torches. At one point, one of the villagers was admonished by his leader because he forgot his torch when they were storming the home of a sinner. This is an egregious violation of the European Peasant Code of Conduct. Never mind that it was broad daylight at the time. Rules are rules. If I had lived in Europe before electricity, I would have chosen "torch making and repair" as my apprenticeship, hoping to become Scoopy the Torch-Maker, richest tradesman in town.
2. Old cross-eyed toothless hags wearing babushkas and pointing crooked fingers. My torch-making shop would also feature promotional gimmicks - buy a torch today and get a free babushka.
3. Loose livestock wandering through the streets and buildings. I'd also stock the shelves of my torch shop with a new-fangled invention called "rope".
4. Spooky religious services with off-key singing. Europe's religious musical scene really suffered from an excess of white people. Well, that and the cows mooing in the church, which somewhat affected the purity of the tone.
5. Evil dwarfs and village idiots.
6. The plague
7. Fog
8. Blind fortune tellers and clairvoyant birds.
9. Large hats. The more important the official, the larger the hat. Cardinals and kings and generals wear hats so big that they need an assistant to hold their head in place. The Russians had to abandon the inherited monarchy, simply choosing as Czar the guy with the strongest neck. As Scoopy the Rich and Powerful Torch-Maker, I would be required to wear a hat larger than the largest oxen in town.
10. Superstition
11. Beggars. There were people begging for food, begging for torches, begging for babushkas. It was horrifying.
12. Dream sequences. Mostly they dreamt about Satan, and sex, and getting punished by Satan for having sex, and owning their own torch.

The plot goes something like this. Believe it or not, this is supposed to take place in 1920, not 1320.

Pedro Gailo lives in a village so small they don't even have a priest. Pedro acts as the sexton, handling all the religious duties in between visits from the priest. It's also a poor town. How poor? They can't even afford their own cheesy musical score, so they have to use hand-me-down Irish folk music instead.

One day, somebody in Pedro's family dies, and Pedro's pretty wife is consoled by a swarthy good-looking guy with an eyepatch and a well-oiled moustache. The gypsy guy also seems to be one of the villagers, except now wearing a disguise devised by Bobby Valentine, and he also may be Satan. Who knows? What matters is that he turns the demure wife into the village slut. One day she's singing Ave Maria in the church loft, without make-up, every inch of her skin covered, the next thing you know she's bathing in bathtub gin, wearing garish make-up, and dancing "Darktown Strutter's Ball" at a gypsy carnival, wearing a costume that would embarrass Bob Fosse.

Meanwhile, Pedro decides that he, too, should be unfaithful like his no-good wife, so he tries to seduce his daughter. The daughter is really not impressed by the idea at all.

Meanwhile, the superstitious villagers have decided to grab their torches and form a mob for the purpose of punishing Pedro's wife. They bring her to the courtyard of the church, and start to stone her. At first, they are reluctant to pick up stones because they would have to set their torches down, and they are afraid that the other, poorer villagers would try for a surreptitious torch-swap.  But they finally screw their courage to the sticking place, and toss in a few tentative change-ups. Then they make the wife get naked. Apparently this is an important element in ritual stoning. At this point, Pedro comes out of the church, wearing the best religious vestments he could find, and saves his wife by reading from the Bible, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". A couple of guys, who are apparently really holy, toss in a couple of rocks, but the other villagers stop them. Obviously her husband has forgiven her, so they must too. This is also in the Peasant Code of Conduct.

The end.