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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
For flashy French director Luc Besson, Joan of Arc's story is just another excuse to play with a whole new set of toys.
Nov 12, 1999 | As a movie hero, Joan of Arc has it all over Jesus. Where Christ always seems to invite wan piety, Joan provokes unashamed, enthusiastic love, and it's not hard to see why. Christ's passive acceptance of suffering is a lot less appealing (and a lot less dramatic) than Joan's courage and rebelliousness. You don't have to believe she was a divine messenger to be amazed by her victories, but if you don't accept Christ as the son of God, what you're left with is pretty masochistic.
In movies alone, Joan has been the subject of Victor Fleming's 1948 film with Ingrid Bergman, who also starred in Roberto Rossellini's unwatchable 1954 film of Arthur Honegger's oratorio "Joan of Arc at the Stake"; Otto Preminger's 1957 version of George Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan," which marked the debut of Jean Seberg; Robert Bresson's 1962 "The Trial of Joan of Arc"; Jacques Rivette's 1994 "Jeanne la Pucelle," starring Sandrine Bonnaire; and the greatest of all Joan films, Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent "The Passion of Joan of Arc," a movie of almost unbearable emotional and physical intensity. It was certainly too much for Maria Falconetti, who played Joan -- it was her first film and she was so drained by the experience she never acted again. (I sympathize. I mean no disparagement to say that Dreyer's is a great film that I have absolutely no desire to see again.)
For all the reasons Joan has inspired artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers, none is perhaps as unusual as that of Luc Besson, the French director of the new international production "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc."
For Besson, Joan's story is an excuse to play with a whole new set of toys. He got to play with spaceships in "The Fifth Element," big guns and explosions in "La Femme Nikita" and "The Professional," various undersea geegaws in "The Big Blue," even the Paris Metro in "Subway." In "The Messenger," Besson lets loose with catapults and flaming arrows, boiling oil and swords, galloping horses and clanking armor, and a whole assortment of evil spiked thingies that are smashed -- at regular intervals -- into various heads and chests and limbs.
You want the brutality of war? How's this for an opening: After seeing a pack of wolves rip the entrails out of war dead, the terrorized child Joan hides in the closet watching while a soldier impales her older sister on his sword and then rapes her corpse. Just so we don't miss the point that the soldiers are, you know, barbarians, a pair sit in the background watching the assault as they gnaw meat from a stew they've poured over the family dining table. (That's a very French definition of barbarism: "Sacri bleu! Zey waste zee sauce!")
Which isn't to suggest that Besson forgets this is a spiritual story. Au contraire, mon frere. The neat thing is, Joan's visions allow him to play with a whole other set of gadgets. His camera and lenses and editing machine and sound effects team work overtime, producing blinding flashes of light and solarized color, tilted angles and speeded-up motion, disorienting shock cuts, even the sight of a sickly looking Christ whose appearances are heralded by backwards tapes that make him seem less the son of God than of George Martin.
I've never left a Luc Besson movie not thinking that the guy has Froot Loops for brains, but at least in his last picture, "The Fifth Element," they rattled around amusingly. Instead of Besson's usual empty image-mongering, that movie showed some genuine zip and invention. Besson's vision of a future metropolis where the streets were stacked on top of one another was the opposite of all the glum dystopias that sprang from "Blade Runner." This city, where taxis zoomed between buildings and you could get lunch from a floating Thai restaurant that came straight to your apartment window, made the future seem like it might be a hell of a lot of fun, or at least the craziest mall ever built. Another thing the movie had going for it was a crazily amusing Milla Jovovich in punk-red hair and Gaultier-designed surgical bandages as the alien wild child Leeloo, cackling and growling and spouting some sort of intergalactic gibberish while she chowed down on roast chicken.
Jovovich married Besson after that film and it was then announced she would star in his Joan of Arc project. (There seems to be some dispute about whose idea "The Messenger" was; reportedly Besson was at one time set to produce Kathryn Bigelow's Joan of Arc film, which was to star Clare Danes.) But "The Messenger" doesn't feel like a love poem to Jovovich (the couple has since separated), or to Joan of Arc, or to anything except his own status as France's biggest commercial filmmaker.
Besson is very shrewdly linking his box-office clout to the adoration of France's national heroine. Which would be fine if his approach weren't entirely self-serving. "The Messenger" is a truly vulgar movie (and I've never described any film with that word), not just because Besson has taken on Joan's story with no feelings of reverence or awe or even much sympathy for her, but because her story is reduced to an excuse for him to parade himself as Luc Besson, Epic Filmmaker.
