Maybe it’s crazy to mention a sentimental classic like It’s a Wonderful Life and the scathingly sacrilegious, scatological Portuguese director João Cesar Monteiro in the same breath. But God’s Wedding, opening tonight in the Northwest Film Forum’s brief Monteiro series, is his (doubtless unintended) answer to that favorite Christmas chestnut¬—a fable of alternate lives that finally comes around, by the opposite path, to the same sweet truth.

God’s Wedding announces its cosmic aspirations from the start, as voices from the firmament—one of them Monteiro’s—recite the credits against the spinning Milky Way. Thence to a park bench where his alter ego, the poetry-spewing tramp João de Deus, feasts on a can of sardines. A man in gleaming navy dress whites strolls up, blandly announces, “I am the envoy of God,” and presents a suitcase stuffed with dollars. “You’re rich as Croesus. You can buy whatever you want.”

“Even whims?” old João purrs. “The most extravagant ones!” the unlikely angel replies. And no, you don’t have to be grateful. You can even exchange the dollars for marks. “They’re more stable.”

João hears a splash and rushes off to rescue a despondent drowning girl¬, spinning out the fable’s other thread. The moral comes when the two threads cross. Along the way João frolics in the most mismatched sex scene (between gaunt, grizzled Monteiro and the nubile Joana Azevedo) ever to escape seeming grotesque. Eventually he winds up in a familiar destination, the booby hatch, this time for answering truthfully where he got the cash. There he meets the envoy who set him up, and who now tells a different story.

Monteiro shoots in a sunlit Iberian version of spare Danish Dogma: available light, measured pacing, whole scenes caught in a single frieze-like, stationary frame. All the better to focus on his impish pantomimes and droll non sequiturs, and to savor the light dancing on a billowing tree or a burning bush.

God’s Wedding shows Mon & Wed, Aug 2 & 4, at 7pm at the Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 206-267-5380._

The Genius of Insanity: Five Films From Joao Cesar Monteiro at NWFF concludes with Come and Go/Vai e Vem, Aug 3 & 5, Tue & Thu, at 7pm.