Jeanne (2019)
(Joan of Arc)
Country: FR
Technical: col 137m
Director: Bruno Dumont
Cast: Lise Leplat Prudhomme, Benoît Robail, Fabrice Luchini
Synopsis:
Jeanne's retinue frets over the silence of her 'voices', she attempts to take Paris, and is put on trial in Rouen for heresy.
Review:
The ever-prolix Dumont picks up Charles Peguy's narrative with this follow-up to Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (which film was a notable flop and took $3,500 worldwide). Dramatically it is a disjointed affair, with incidents randomly chosen and rarely shown, and the locations, in the Pas-de-Calais and Amiens cathedral respectively, are wilfully inapt, with WW2 pillboxes appropriated ostentatiously for the purpose. The impressively eloquent but affectless Prudhomme presides over a cast made up of professionals, inbreds and eunuchs, spouting prolifically in vaguely archaic French, with no attempt to endow their scenes with dramatic agency or tension. Meanwhile, every so often, we pause for reverie, while Christophe intones his own falsetto compositions, as in a Léos Carax movie. The film did well at Cannes, but only made up one tenth of its $1.5 million cost, most of which can only have been spent on the costumes. As before with Dumont, the subject matter is one of spirituality, but the treatment lies somewhere between the absurdly comic and the bathetic. Not since Bresson's Lancelot du lac can there have been such spectacular disappointment.
(Joan of Arc)
Country: FR
Technical: col 137m
Director: Bruno Dumont
Cast: Lise Leplat Prudhomme, Benoît Robail, Fabrice Luchini
Synopsis:
Jeanne's retinue frets over the silence of her 'voices', she attempts to take Paris, and is put on trial in Rouen for heresy.
Review:
The ever-prolix Dumont picks up Charles Peguy's narrative with this follow-up to Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (which film was a notable flop and took $3,500 worldwide). Dramatically it is a disjointed affair, with incidents randomly chosen and rarely shown, and the locations, in the Pas-de-Calais and Amiens cathedral respectively, are wilfully inapt, with WW2 pillboxes appropriated ostentatiously for the purpose. The impressively eloquent but affectless Prudhomme presides over a cast made up of professionals, inbreds and eunuchs, spouting prolifically in vaguely archaic French, with no attempt to endow their scenes with dramatic agency or tension. Meanwhile, every so often, we pause for reverie, while Christophe intones his own falsetto compositions, as in a Léos Carax movie. The film did well at Cannes, but only made up one tenth of its $1.5 million cost, most of which can only have been spent on the costumes. As before with Dumont, the subject matter is one of spirituality, but the treatment lies somewhere between the absurdly comic and the bathetic. Not since Bresson's Lancelot du lac can there have been such spectacular disappointment.
(Joan of Arc)
Country: FR
Technical: col 137m
Director: Bruno Dumont
Cast: Lise Leplat Prudhomme, Benoît Robail, Fabrice Luchini
Synopsis:
Jeanne's retinue frets over the silence of her 'voices', she attempts to take Paris, and is put on trial in Rouen for heresy.
Review:
The ever-prolix Dumont picks up Charles Peguy's narrative with this follow-up to Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (which film was a notable flop and took $3,500 worldwide). Dramatically it is a disjointed affair, with incidents randomly chosen and rarely shown, and the locations, in the Pas-de-Calais and Amiens cathedral respectively, are wilfully inapt, with WW2 pillboxes appropriated ostentatiously for the purpose. The impressively eloquent but affectless Prudhomme presides over a cast made up of professionals, inbreds and eunuchs, spouting prolifically in vaguely archaic French, with no attempt to endow their scenes with dramatic agency or tension. Meanwhile, every so often, we pause for reverie, while Christophe intones his own falsetto compositions, as in a Léos Carax movie. The film did well at Cannes, but only made up one tenth of its $1.5 million cost, most of which can only have been spent on the costumes. As before with Dumont, the subject matter is one of spirituality, but the treatment lies somewhere between the absurdly comic and the bathetic. Not since Bresson's Lancelot du lac can there have been such spectacular disappointment.