Part III. Joan on Film: Latter Days
May. 30th, 2005 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ealgylden(Part I. Joan on Film: In the Beginning)
(Part II. Joan on Film: The Middle Age)
Next, a quartet of films from the '80s-'90s. Or three films and a miniseries, actually. No matter. On to Joan at the end of the twentieth century!
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), Jane Wiedlin:
"Noah's wife?"
I should probably be embarrassed about this, but Jane Wiedlin, the Go-Go turned actress whose other most recognizable credit is as the singing telegram girl in Clue, is one of my favorite cinematic Joans. She gets less screen time than Billy the Kid or Socrates, true, but she makes a great impression. She first turns up as a mention in Bill and Ted's history class, where we learn that no, she's not Noah's wife. Hee! Then it's off through time in a phone booth, gathering personages of historical significance. Conveniently, Joan has just had her triumph at Orléans when Bill and Ted land in her chapel, so she's in a good mood and looking for a sign. Keanu reaching out his hand like God bringing Adam to life on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Pretty good sign, that. Okay, this isn't the most serious interpretation you'll ever see, but I'm sticking to my guns that it's a very good one nonetheless. Jane's Joan speaks only French, is short but strong-looking, looks sweet and attractive but not like a supermodel or a movie star, and seems almost young enough to be the right age (almost). She looks like a Joan. And despite her brief appearance, she also seems curious, intelligent, and adaptable enough to jump five hundred years in time without freaking out, not to mention clever enough to see the useful potential of healthy exercise. Okay, conquering an aerobics class may not have been the best idea, but Joan always was a go-getter. I'd love to see how her troops reacted to the full-scale aerobics program she planned to institute on her return to her own time. Ted has it right when he says that "Miss of Arc" was a "most bodacious soldier and general." And Jane Wieldin is a most bodacious Joan.
Jeanne la Pucelle: Les batailles and Jeanne la Pucelle: Les prisons (1994), Sandrine Bonnaire:
"Quelque folle... ou quelque sorcière..."
Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about Jacques Rivette's version of the story. These are difficult, idiosyncratic films, headed by a difficult, idiosyncratic Joan. She's not as easy to love as Simone Genevoix or as tempting to pity as Milla Jovovich. Sandrine looks serious, stubborn, a bit sulky. She's attractive but off-kilter. Hers is not a Joan who charms her way to influence, but then, she doesn't need to. She knows who she is and what she must do, and the world must bend to her mission or take its chances with God. Sandrine's Joan is a direct woman who doesn't seem particularly uplifted by her divine commands. She's driven by saints, driven by fate, and just plain driven.
There’s something very austere about these films. Rivette was working with a much tighter budget than is often accorded to films set in the Middle Ages (the movies loving pageantry as they do), but I somehow doubt he would have spent a larger bankroll on lavish costumes and thrilling battles even if he'd been able to. At times the films have a deliberate, stagy theatricality, and at others it seems as if Rivette was wandering the French countryside with his camera and happened across an incident from Joan's life as it unfolded. There's a good deal of empty space in these films, rolling fields and sparse forests and rooms too large for the crowds they hold (the tiny cast means her army looks like it's about fifty men. Definitely miraculous victories here). The costumes are generally accurate if generically medieval, except for Joan's, which look as though they're medieval as interpreted by a contemporary designer (albeit in a rigorously austere manner. Joan by way of Jil Sander). These are very talky films, but the dialogue is crowded with silent thoughts and pauses (I invariably end up quoting Crow T. Robot as I watch: "This has more pauses than a Pinter play!"). Scenes often just end, with no smooth transitions between them. Most strikingly of all (at least if you're like me), there's almost no music. The underscore appears rarely, and only during scenes like the battle of Orléans and the coronation. The score doesn't even reappear for her execution, during which we hear only the crackling of the flames, a few coughs from Joan, and her last words ("Jesus! Jesus!"). Nothing is made easy for the audience. Even the matter of Joan's Voices is left obscure- she believes in them without question, but there are no indications of how we're meant to believe.
This is the only film in my collection that shows the pre-Orléans inquest at Poitiers, during which Joan was deemed free from heresy and therefore suitable for use by the Dauphin, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were the only Joan film in general that does. Most mention it in passing during the trial at Rouen, skip it altogether or elide it with a bit of voiceover and montage (as is the case in the Leelee Sobieski version), so as to avoid structural repetition and the lessening of the impact of her final trial. Rivette, ever the individualist, not only includes Poitiers but does not include the latter inquisition. The resulting structure heightens the talkiness of the script. She waits and talks and waits at Vaucouleurs, then she waits and talks and waits at Poitiers, then she waits and talks and waits at Orléans, followed by a battle scene that lasts five minutes, if that. It's a film that rewards careful watching and contemplation, but I don't blame anyone who finds it painfully slow. The coronation too is lengthy and lacking in luxury, and then it's off to Paris, where Joan's Voices stop giving her orders. Sandrine's Joan goes where she's driven, so the lack of commands frustrates her in the extreme. This is definitely a Joan of whom it's easy to believe she'll "last only a year;" we can practically see the clock ticking over her head. Sure enough, by now Charles has made his treaties and cast her off, followed shortly thereafter by her captains. When she's captured and faced with Cauchon, there is a rare, clear declaration of hostilities between them, but the moment is, as usual, subdued. Her trial and her abjuration are elided in a long scene of bickering and politicking among the bishops, during which Sandrine's Joan seems far less exhausted or frightened than others have in the part. Indeed, her abjuration comes as a bit of a surprise (from an emotional standpoint, at least, since we know it has to be part of the story). In this incarnation, she is not a woman who shares many of her emotions with the world, which makes it all the more painful that she reacts to her sentencing with an agonized scream. It hurts to see this determined, frustrated, resolute young woman crumple in the corner of her cell in grief and fear, and then have to be dragged up to the top of her high pyre. Perhaps the only emotional moments more striking are when she laughs, which she does all of twice. The first is as she cuts her hair before leaving for Chinon, ending her life as Joan of Domrémy, the simple and anonymous peasant. And the second is as she signs her abjuration, ending her life as la Pucelle (and ultimately ending her life altogether). That this most serious Joan's journey is punctuated by laughter is fittingly complicated.
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), Milla Jovovich:
"She's nuts!"
Oh man, this movie. This movie hurt me. I saw it twice in the theater, with two different friends who couldn't coordinate their schedules, and I'm still bitter. So much bitterness! And all because there was a shiny new Joan movie, full of possibilities, and it... it... sucked.
Well, time heals all wounds. Wait, no it doesn't. This movie still sucks! Still, as my disappointment has dulled over the years, I've been able to appreciate the good bits more easily, and get some laughs out of the rest of it. Well, some of it. But that's a step up, right?
So we begin in Joan's childhood, with a blonde moppet frolicking across some gorgeous rolling countryside (The Messenger was filmed in France and the Czech Republic, and looks lovely). Joan's happy, her family is happy, everybody's happy. True, Joan's a bit overenthusiastic about religion already, pestering her priest with multiple confessions a day, but all is generally pretty good. This will never do. We're deep in the Hundred Years War and Joan is presumably about to start hearing her Voices, so one would think that would be plenty to trigger some drama, but no, not if you're Luc Besson. He decides to have Joan, while hiding from an attacking English soldier, witness the horrific murder and rape (in that order) of her sister Catherine. It's a traumatic scene, for the viewer and Joan, even in as violent a movie as this. Of course, Besson ignores that Joan's sister Catherine seems to have been younger, not older, and as far as we know never suffered anything like this. Nor did her three brothers, who've been eliminated from the film entirely. Anyway, this tragedy is the plot device by which Joan is "created". The rapist soldier (and his fellows) are English, not Burgundians, proving that the English are eeeeevil. He mocks, "Oooh, a woman with a sword," to which Catherine answers, "If that's God's will, so be it." Joan's wailing to a priest in the aftermath, about why she was spared at the expense of Catherine, is met with, "Perhaps He [God] chose you for some higher call." Besson sews the seeds of a traumatized Joan who is mentally unstable, religiously fanatical and hell-bent on revenge, whatever the cost. It's certainly a different take. And positing this sort of Joan, a Joan the Mad, certainly has interesting possibilities, but they're wasted on this movie. Besson's film is a mess and a half.
Anyway, off to Chinon with the Maid. The Dauphin is played by John Malkovich, twitchy and fey as ever, and the real power in the kingdom is a shaved and elaborately headdressed Faye Dunaway as his mother-in-law. She's a hammer and a politician who keeps the vaguely childish Charles firmly in hand. And you know, they both seem like fairly odd casting choices, but somehow it works out fairly well. Though the fairly odd part isn't really inaccurate... when Milla's twitchiness meets Malkovich's, one can't help but worry for the breakables in the castle. The scene in which Joan identifies the Dauphin is a triumph of discomfort. Milla is so oddly beautiful, and her Joan is fragile and unstable, so overwhelmed and terrified to be at court. She has no concept of proper boundaries in relation to anyone, let alone her uncrowned king. It's uncomfortable and fascinating to watch her breathlessly sweeping Charles up into her visions, or as Besson insists, her delusions. Joan's Voices, her patrons and their specific symbolic meanings, are replaced in this film with vague (if nicely-filmed) images of wolves and winds, streaming lights and shattering windows, not to mention the very creepy enthroned boy in the woods who grows up to be an even creepier Jesus-type. It's interesting, but it's meaningless. Or rather, the meanings that visitations by Sts. Catherine, Margaret and Michael would have in a medieval context are replaced with "this chick is crackers!"
The rest of the cast is a fest of European HItGs!, and her captains are particularly fun. Vincent Cassel plays Gilles de Rais as a more appealing variation of his established "Marquis de Creepy BadWrong" type, and it makes up for some truly unfortunate hair. Richard Ridings plays La Hire much as he did Silas the Horseman, with equal parts scary, murderous brute and playful, cuddly giant. I think my favorite is Tcheky Karyo's Dunois, though. He tries so hard to be respectful and straightforward with the whackdoodle teenaged girl who's been sent to lead his men, and it's not hard to see why he's tempted to just throw up his hands and forget it. Poor Joan; Besson stacks the deck so high against her. When Gilles de Rais and La Hire chuckle, "she's nuts!" to each other, the audience can't help but agree. Honestly, I'm not sure why her captains follow her in this version of the story. She's an unsteady leader of men, lacks a military mind, doesn't seem enlightened or blessed, is too uncontrollable to be a reliable mascot... in small doses, perhaps, she'd work. She's a striking figure on her horse, banner in hand, as long as she's not currently screaming or spazzing or having one of her fits. Perhaps her captains are so filled with ennui that following her brief candle of nuttiness makes a nice change? This Joan is tremendously frustrating, the more so because there are times when Milla hits just the right tone, like when she says to Gilles and Dunois, "You have been with your counsel, and I have been with mine." It's a good quote anyway, but Milla is calm and intense and sells it so well. It makes the shrieky bits that much more painful.
Besson seems to have a fetish for the machinery of medieval warfare. He takes time to showcase a wide variety of brutal mechanisms, lest anyone get bored watching men die terribly. Also, it's a nice change to see battle scenes that aren't all jump-cut and hyper-edited, Ridley Scott style, but I'm not sure how pleased I am to trade that for cameras lingering lovingly on exploding heads and severed limbs. And then there are the moments of high melodrama, like Joan's wounding at the walls of Orléans. We follow the archer in semi-slow-mo as he stalks toward the walls and the ignorant Joan, and after he shoots her, she freezes (as does the score) and falls back onto her soldiers, again in semi-slow-mo, arms outstretched as if crucified. Sheesh. She reacts to her wound with pain and panic, and her captains are really rather sweetly concerned. There's a long distance standoff between Joan and a foulmouthed English soldier the following dawn- he calls insults to her troops and her supposedly dead body, only to be silenced by her hoarse reply and the image of her standing in the mist with her banner. It's a great cinematic moment and one of the few in which Joan seems daunting rather than hair-triggered. But when the battle is rejoined, Joan begins to unravel, complete with visions of Creepy Jesus in the middle of the fight. Between that and the traumatic aftermath of her glorious battle (she didn't expect it to be quite so gory), it's pretty obvious that a breakdown approaches. She enjoys her triumph at Orléans, but the coronation has barely passed before she's confronting a calm and collected Charles with his choice of diplomacy over battle, while he's in the bath (again not respecting boundaries, and among these films the only version of the split with Charles that doesn't occur in the public realm). At Compiègne, Joan abandons her banner for the sword for the first time, and is promptly captured. And it's at this point that this extremely wobbly movie goes entirely off the rails.
Dustin Hoffman shows up. He's credited as "The Conscience," though he might as well be the Voice of God or the Voice of Schizophrenia or whatever. It hardly matters. He spends the rest of the movie, or at least those scenes in which Joan isn't shrieking at her judges, condemning her for being prideful and daring to assume her mad Voices were divine commands, for why on earth would God talk to someone like her? She just wanted an excuse to go kill Englishmen and get her revenge. I just... you know, somehow it doesn't surprise me that Milla and Luc Besson divorced shortly after making this. Milla's not the world's greatest actress, but she deserved a better movie than this. Anyway, Joan's crazy, not even she believes in her Voices anymore, it was all a lie and a betrayal, she's drenched in blood and can never be forgiven, off to the pyre, the end. Arrgh!
A few strikingly beautiful images from a crackbrained film:
- the child Joan lying with arms outstretched, in a field, as a sword lies beside her, hidden by the tall grass
- Joan standing motionless, holding her banner, as her army sweeps past and all around her in a great wave toward the walls of Orléans
- Joan alone on her horse, facing down hundreds of English knights and soldiers, again armed with just her banner
Joan of Arc (1999), Leelee Sobieski:
"Come out, that I might send you to hell!"
Leelee joins Simone Genevoix and Jean Seberg in the ranks of actual teenagers who've played Joan, and the results fall somewhere between the two in terms of success. There's something very American about Leelee's Joan. This miniseries is one of the most explicit in naming Joan's Voices as divinely sent, to the point of periodically bathing Leelee in ribbons of golden light, and yet she doesn't really read as a mystic or a visionary. This is an active Joan, a military Joan, a young woman who strides like a knight and uses her pretty alto voice as a rallying trumpet.
The miniseries begins at the end of the story, though not with the comforting, controlling patronage of the Church, as in Ingrid Bergman's version. No, here we start on the pyre, with Joan raising her face from the flames to the heavens. Then we get an intertitle saying, "Once, in a time known as the Dark Ages..." and I boo and throw things at the TV. Quit it with the "Dark Ages" crap, Hollywood! Boo! Hiss! Sorry, it's a big peeve. Anyway. Next intertitle! "There lived a legend whose coming had been foretold by the great prophet Merlin." That's an odd way to begin, don't you think? It really is striking how strongly the miniseries tries to hit the mystical aspects of the Joan legend without necessarily doing the same with the religious ones (which are there- they're just used a bit like fancy dress). It's also striking how down-to-earth Leelee's Joan is in spite of this. She's on the Simone Genevoix- Sandrine Bonnaire end of the spectrum rather than the Ingrid Bergman- Milla Jovovich end. Then we jump from flames and prophecies to... Joan's birth! A much earlier start than usual, that. No sooner has Isabelle given birth to Joan than Jacques d'Arc turns up to remind her than she's supposed to be fleeing with the rest of Domrémy before the Burgundians arrive, not lazing around having babies, and he grabs infant Joan to get rid of her. Isabelle is understandably not pleased with this plan and refuses to let Jacques dispose of their daughter. Thank you, Isabelle! She keeps her child, we keep our heroine, and years of tension between Joan and her father are set in motion, particularly as Joan grows up headstrong and outspoken. Jacques d'Arc is rarely so high profile a character in Joan's life as he is here, and there is a notable undercurrent of "trade the father who doesn't approve for the Father who does" in this Joan's journey, though both of them are willing to sacrifice her if they must. Poor Joan.
Joan has her first vision in church when she's about ten, but they don't disturb her life until seven years later, after the Burgundians have (again) ransacked her village and killed her boy-sidekick (played by Joan of Arcadia's Teen God!). As she weeps in the rain and rages at the heavens, golden light and sparklies pour down on her, and it really is rather startling to see such a blatant representation of heavenly selection after years of oblique visual references and symbolic coding. It's an interesting choice, and one which Leelee's Joan promptly brings back to earth in Vaucouleurs, as she spends her time calming babies, bonding with nuns and fortifying the city walls. This Joan has common sense, a way with people, and some amount of military savvy. She heads off for Chinon with some new boy-sidekicks, acquiring as she goes a sword from a church dedicated to St. Catherine, in a rarely-filmed episode from the historical Joan's legend. It's a beautiful scene, with firelight flickering across the sword and a painting of the saint, reflecting on Leelee's lovely face. But sadly we must leave it to meet Neil Patrick Harris's Dauphin, far too young for the part but not bad overall, and Peter O'Toole's Cauchon. Cauchon isn't usually introduced until much later in the story, often not before Joan's trial begins, but O'Toole is so good that the extra time with him is appreciated. His Cauchon can almost believe in Joan, but not quite, and he's deeply wary of the potential for disorder she presents. Educate her, place her in a convent, channel her energies into forms he can understand, and he'll have uses for her fine mind and her strong faith. But as she is, her dangers outweigh her virtues.
The miniseries seems to have used up all of its complexity on Cauchon, since the only one of Joan's captains we get is La Hire (Peter Strauss), and he's a cowboy who goes around hollering, "Glasdale, this tower ain't big enough for the both of us!" Okay, not in those exact words. There's some interesting tension between Joan and La Hire before he learns to trust her mysterious military insight, but mostly I found him irritating. Ah well. Joan is directly involved in planning the attack on Orléans, and she does her usual bold leading-of-the-troops deal, but when she's wounded, it's not even meant for her. Instead of being shot while climbing the walls, like usual, she rides her horse forward to intercept the arrow aimed at her boy-sidekick. Again, it's a slightly odd choice, but I guess this soldier-Joan, while heroic and self-sacrificing, isn't careless enough to make herself a target accidentally.
Her military savvy unfortunately doesn't extend to courtly politics, where she chooses her battles poorly. She confronts Charles about his treaties during a banquet, and follows that by getting into a doctrinal argument with Cauchon, tipping the royal scales against them both. This Joan is cast off when her usefulness has passed not because she's embarrassing and can be easily isolated, like Bergman's and Seberg's, but because she's too caught up in the military aspect of her mission. She sees only the battles of the war, and not the politics, and so she's a liability. For some reason, though, the miniseries strives to soften our reaction to Joan's capture by letting her be aware it's coming. Her Voices tell her (and she tells us) that Charles will betray her. When he sets her up, she hints at her knowledge just enough that he offers her an out, which she then refuses to take. They both still have their parts to play, she reminds him. I suppose the logic was that it's easier for the audience to forgive Charles if Joan has already forgiven him, and that her fate will be less traumatic (again, for the audience) if she's seen accepting it, in the same way that the "and now she's a saint" opening of the Bergman version softens the tragic ending. Not that this sort of structure is necessarily effective, of course...
So Joan is captured and imprisoned. She's briefly made a noble pet and offered the chance to continue her education, courtly life and "manly pursuits" in exchange for leading Burgundy's armies, but of course she refuses, and we come to her trial and the face-off with Cauchon. O'Toole's Cauchon is a formidable opponent who'd gladly burn her to save her, but Leelee's Joan is no more meek here than she was when facing her father. She's aggressively stubborn in her testimony, and her abjuration, when it comes, is brief. She plans to go down fighting. Sadly for Joan, in this version the often-present threat/actuality of rape at the hands of her guards is made as explicit as it ever is, and she's left shattered (only in Jeanne la Pucelle: Les prisons is this theme presented as openly, though it is implied in some of the other versions). She's still a warrior, but it's now an effort for her to rally enough to retract her abjuration. Only at the moment of her death does she come back to life, thanking her Voices as the flames surround her.
And finally, Joan on TV.
(Part II. Joan on Film: The Middle Age)
Next, a quartet of films from the '80s-'90s. Or three films and a miniseries, actually. No matter. On to Joan at the end of the twentieth century!
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), Jane Wiedlin:
"Noah's wife?"
I should probably be embarrassed about this, but Jane Wiedlin, the Go-Go turned actress whose other most recognizable credit is as the singing telegram girl in Clue, is one of my favorite cinematic Joans. She gets less screen time than Billy the Kid or Socrates, true, but she makes a great impression. She first turns up as a mention in Bill and Ted's history class, where we learn that no, she's not Noah's wife. Hee! Then it's off through time in a phone booth, gathering personages of historical significance. Conveniently, Joan has just had her triumph at Orléans when Bill and Ted land in her chapel, so she's in a good mood and looking for a sign. Keanu reaching out his hand like God bringing Adam to life on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Pretty good sign, that. Okay, this isn't the most serious interpretation you'll ever see, but I'm sticking to my guns that it's a very good one nonetheless. Jane's Joan speaks only French, is short but strong-looking, looks sweet and attractive but not like a supermodel or a movie star, and seems almost young enough to be the right age (almost). She looks like a Joan. And despite her brief appearance, she also seems curious, intelligent, and adaptable enough to jump five hundred years in time without freaking out, not to mention clever enough to see the useful potential of healthy exercise. Okay, conquering an aerobics class may not have been the best idea, but Joan always was a go-getter. I'd love to see how her troops reacted to the full-scale aerobics program she planned to institute on her return to her own time. Ted has it right when he says that "Miss of Arc" was a "most bodacious soldier and general." And Jane Wieldin is a most bodacious Joan.
Jeanne la Pucelle: Les batailles and Jeanne la Pucelle: Les prisons (1994), Sandrine Bonnaire:
"Quelque folle... ou quelque sorcière..."
Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about Jacques Rivette's version of the story. These are difficult, idiosyncratic films, headed by a difficult, idiosyncratic Joan. She's not as easy to love as Simone Genevoix or as tempting to pity as Milla Jovovich. Sandrine looks serious, stubborn, a bit sulky. She's attractive but off-kilter. Hers is not a Joan who charms her way to influence, but then, she doesn't need to. She knows who she is and what she must do, and the world must bend to her mission or take its chances with God. Sandrine's Joan is a direct woman who doesn't seem particularly uplifted by her divine commands. She's driven by saints, driven by fate, and just plain driven.
There’s something very austere about these films. Rivette was working with a much tighter budget than is often accorded to films set in the Middle Ages (the movies loving pageantry as they do), but I somehow doubt he would have spent a larger bankroll on lavish costumes and thrilling battles even if he'd been able to. At times the films have a deliberate, stagy theatricality, and at others it seems as if Rivette was wandering the French countryside with his camera and happened across an incident from Joan's life as it unfolded. There's a good deal of empty space in these films, rolling fields and sparse forests and rooms too large for the crowds they hold (the tiny cast means her army looks like it's about fifty men. Definitely miraculous victories here). The costumes are generally accurate if generically medieval, except for Joan's, which look as though they're medieval as interpreted by a contemporary designer (albeit in a rigorously austere manner. Joan by way of Jil Sander). These are very talky films, but the dialogue is crowded with silent thoughts and pauses (I invariably end up quoting Crow T. Robot as I watch: "This has more pauses than a Pinter play!"). Scenes often just end, with no smooth transitions between them. Most strikingly of all (at least if you're like me), there's almost no music. The underscore appears rarely, and only during scenes like the battle of Orléans and the coronation. The score doesn't even reappear for her execution, during which we hear only the crackling of the flames, a few coughs from Joan, and her last words ("Jesus! Jesus!"). Nothing is made easy for the audience. Even the matter of Joan's Voices is left obscure- she believes in them without question, but there are no indications of how we're meant to believe.
This is the only film in my collection that shows the pre-Orléans inquest at Poitiers, during which Joan was deemed free from heresy and therefore suitable for use by the Dauphin, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were the only Joan film in general that does. Most mention it in passing during the trial at Rouen, skip it altogether or elide it with a bit of voiceover and montage (as is the case in the Leelee Sobieski version), so as to avoid structural repetition and the lessening of the impact of her final trial. Rivette, ever the individualist, not only includes Poitiers but does not include the latter inquisition. The resulting structure heightens the talkiness of the script. She waits and talks and waits at Vaucouleurs, then she waits and talks and waits at Poitiers, then she waits and talks and waits at Orléans, followed by a battle scene that lasts five minutes, if that. It's a film that rewards careful watching and contemplation, but I don't blame anyone who finds it painfully slow. The coronation too is lengthy and lacking in luxury, and then it's off to Paris, where Joan's Voices stop giving her orders. Sandrine's Joan goes where she's driven, so the lack of commands frustrates her in the extreme. This is definitely a Joan of whom it's easy to believe she'll "last only a year;" we can practically see the clock ticking over her head. Sure enough, by now Charles has made his treaties and cast her off, followed shortly thereafter by her captains. When she's captured and faced with Cauchon, there is a rare, clear declaration of hostilities between them, but the moment is, as usual, subdued. Her trial and her abjuration are elided in a long scene of bickering and politicking among the bishops, during which Sandrine's Joan seems far less exhausted or frightened than others have in the part. Indeed, her abjuration comes as a bit of a surprise (from an emotional standpoint, at least, since we know it has to be part of the story). In this incarnation, she is not a woman who shares many of her emotions with the world, which makes it all the more painful that she reacts to her sentencing with an agonized scream. It hurts to see this determined, frustrated, resolute young woman crumple in the corner of her cell in grief and fear, and then have to be dragged up to the top of her high pyre. Perhaps the only emotional moments more striking are when she laughs, which she does all of twice. The first is as she cuts her hair before leaving for Chinon, ending her life as Joan of Domrémy, the simple and anonymous peasant. And the second is as she signs her abjuration, ending her life as la Pucelle (and ultimately ending her life altogether). That this most serious Joan's journey is punctuated by laughter is fittingly complicated.
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), Milla Jovovich:
"She's nuts!"
Oh man, this movie. This movie hurt me. I saw it twice in the theater, with two different friends who couldn't coordinate their schedules, and I'm still bitter. So much bitterness! And all because there was a shiny new Joan movie, full of possibilities, and it... it... sucked.
Well, time heals all wounds. Wait, no it doesn't. This movie still sucks! Still, as my disappointment has dulled over the years, I've been able to appreciate the good bits more easily, and get some laughs out of the rest of it. Well, some of it. But that's a step up, right?
So we begin in Joan's childhood, with a blonde moppet frolicking across some gorgeous rolling countryside (The Messenger was filmed in France and the Czech Republic, and looks lovely). Joan's happy, her family is happy, everybody's happy. True, Joan's a bit overenthusiastic about religion already, pestering her priest with multiple confessions a day, but all is generally pretty good. This will never do. We're deep in the Hundred Years War and Joan is presumably about to start hearing her Voices, so one would think that would be plenty to trigger some drama, but no, not if you're Luc Besson. He decides to have Joan, while hiding from an attacking English soldier, witness the horrific murder and rape (in that order) of her sister Catherine. It's a traumatic scene, for the viewer and Joan, even in as violent a movie as this. Of course, Besson ignores that Joan's sister Catherine seems to have been younger, not older, and as far as we know never suffered anything like this. Nor did her three brothers, who've been eliminated from the film entirely. Anyway, this tragedy is the plot device by which Joan is "created". The rapist soldier (and his fellows) are English, not Burgundians, proving that the English are eeeeevil. He mocks, "Oooh, a woman with a sword," to which Catherine answers, "If that's God's will, so be it." Joan's wailing to a priest in the aftermath, about why she was spared at the expense of Catherine, is met with, "Perhaps He [God] chose you for some higher call." Besson sews the seeds of a traumatized Joan who is mentally unstable, religiously fanatical and hell-bent on revenge, whatever the cost. It's certainly a different take. And positing this sort of Joan, a Joan the Mad, certainly has interesting possibilities, but they're wasted on this movie. Besson's film is a mess and a half.
Anyway, off to Chinon with the Maid. The Dauphin is played by John Malkovich, twitchy and fey as ever, and the real power in the kingdom is a shaved and elaborately headdressed Faye Dunaway as his mother-in-law. She's a hammer and a politician who keeps the vaguely childish Charles firmly in hand. And you know, they both seem like fairly odd casting choices, but somehow it works out fairly well. Though the fairly odd part isn't really inaccurate... when Milla's twitchiness meets Malkovich's, one can't help but worry for the breakables in the castle. The scene in which Joan identifies the Dauphin is a triumph of discomfort. Milla is so oddly beautiful, and her Joan is fragile and unstable, so overwhelmed and terrified to be at court. She has no concept of proper boundaries in relation to anyone, let alone her uncrowned king. It's uncomfortable and fascinating to watch her breathlessly sweeping Charles up into her visions, or as Besson insists, her delusions. Joan's Voices, her patrons and their specific symbolic meanings, are replaced in this film with vague (if nicely-filmed) images of wolves and winds, streaming lights and shattering windows, not to mention the very creepy enthroned boy in the woods who grows up to be an even creepier Jesus-type. It's interesting, but it's meaningless. Or rather, the meanings that visitations by Sts. Catherine, Margaret and Michael would have in a medieval context are replaced with "this chick is crackers!"
The rest of the cast is a fest of European HItGs!, and her captains are particularly fun. Vincent Cassel plays Gilles de Rais as a more appealing variation of his established "Marquis de Creepy BadWrong" type, and it makes up for some truly unfortunate hair. Richard Ridings plays La Hire much as he did Silas the Horseman, with equal parts scary, murderous brute and playful, cuddly giant. I think my favorite is Tcheky Karyo's Dunois, though. He tries so hard to be respectful and straightforward with the whackdoodle teenaged girl who's been sent to lead his men, and it's not hard to see why he's tempted to just throw up his hands and forget it. Poor Joan; Besson stacks the deck so high against her. When Gilles de Rais and La Hire chuckle, "she's nuts!" to each other, the audience can't help but agree. Honestly, I'm not sure why her captains follow her in this version of the story. She's an unsteady leader of men, lacks a military mind, doesn't seem enlightened or blessed, is too uncontrollable to be a reliable mascot... in small doses, perhaps, she'd work. She's a striking figure on her horse, banner in hand, as long as she's not currently screaming or spazzing or having one of her fits. Perhaps her captains are so filled with ennui that following her brief candle of nuttiness makes a nice change? This Joan is tremendously frustrating, the more so because there are times when Milla hits just the right tone, like when she says to Gilles and Dunois, "You have been with your counsel, and I have been with mine." It's a good quote anyway, but Milla is calm and intense and sells it so well. It makes the shrieky bits that much more painful.
Besson seems to have a fetish for the machinery of medieval warfare. He takes time to showcase a wide variety of brutal mechanisms, lest anyone get bored watching men die terribly. Also, it's a nice change to see battle scenes that aren't all jump-cut and hyper-edited, Ridley Scott style, but I'm not sure how pleased I am to trade that for cameras lingering lovingly on exploding heads and severed limbs. And then there are the moments of high melodrama, like Joan's wounding at the walls of Orléans. We follow the archer in semi-slow-mo as he stalks toward the walls and the ignorant Joan, and after he shoots her, she freezes (as does the score) and falls back onto her soldiers, again in semi-slow-mo, arms outstretched as if crucified. Sheesh. She reacts to her wound with pain and panic, and her captains are really rather sweetly concerned. There's a long distance standoff between Joan and a foulmouthed English soldier the following dawn- he calls insults to her troops and her supposedly dead body, only to be silenced by her hoarse reply and the image of her standing in the mist with her banner. It's a great cinematic moment and one of the few in which Joan seems daunting rather than hair-triggered. But when the battle is rejoined, Joan begins to unravel, complete with visions of Creepy Jesus in the middle of the fight. Between that and the traumatic aftermath of her glorious battle (she didn't expect it to be quite so gory), it's pretty obvious that a breakdown approaches. She enjoys her triumph at Orléans, but the coronation has barely passed before she's confronting a calm and collected Charles with his choice of diplomacy over battle, while he's in the bath (again not respecting boundaries, and among these films the only version of the split with Charles that doesn't occur in the public realm). At Compiègne, Joan abandons her banner for the sword for the first time, and is promptly captured. And it's at this point that this extremely wobbly movie goes entirely off the rails.
Dustin Hoffman shows up. He's credited as "The Conscience," though he might as well be the Voice of God or the Voice of Schizophrenia or whatever. It hardly matters. He spends the rest of the movie, or at least those scenes in which Joan isn't shrieking at her judges, condemning her for being prideful and daring to assume her mad Voices were divine commands, for why on earth would God talk to someone like her? She just wanted an excuse to go kill Englishmen and get her revenge. I just... you know, somehow it doesn't surprise me that Milla and Luc Besson divorced shortly after making this. Milla's not the world's greatest actress, but she deserved a better movie than this. Anyway, Joan's crazy, not even she believes in her Voices anymore, it was all a lie and a betrayal, she's drenched in blood and can never be forgiven, off to the pyre, the end. Arrgh!
A few strikingly beautiful images from a crackbrained film:
- the child Joan lying with arms outstretched, in a field, as a sword lies beside her, hidden by the tall grass
- Joan standing motionless, holding her banner, as her army sweeps past and all around her in a great wave toward the walls of Orléans
- Joan alone on her horse, facing down hundreds of English knights and soldiers, again armed with just her banner
Joan of Arc (1999), Leelee Sobieski:
"Come out, that I might send you to hell!"
Leelee joins Simone Genevoix and Jean Seberg in the ranks of actual teenagers who've played Joan, and the results fall somewhere between the two in terms of success. There's something very American about Leelee's Joan. This miniseries is one of the most explicit in naming Joan's Voices as divinely sent, to the point of periodically bathing Leelee in ribbons of golden light, and yet she doesn't really read as a mystic or a visionary. This is an active Joan, a military Joan, a young woman who strides like a knight and uses her pretty alto voice as a rallying trumpet.
The miniseries begins at the end of the story, though not with the comforting, controlling patronage of the Church, as in Ingrid Bergman's version. No, here we start on the pyre, with Joan raising her face from the flames to the heavens. Then we get an intertitle saying, "Once, in a time known as the Dark Ages..." and I boo and throw things at the TV. Quit it with the "Dark Ages" crap, Hollywood! Boo! Hiss! Sorry, it's a big peeve. Anyway. Next intertitle! "There lived a legend whose coming had been foretold by the great prophet Merlin." That's an odd way to begin, don't you think? It really is striking how strongly the miniseries tries to hit the mystical aspects of the Joan legend without necessarily doing the same with the religious ones (which are there- they're just used a bit like fancy dress). It's also striking how down-to-earth Leelee's Joan is in spite of this. She's on the Simone Genevoix- Sandrine Bonnaire end of the spectrum rather than the Ingrid Bergman- Milla Jovovich end. Then we jump from flames and prophecies to... Joan's birth! A much earlier start than usual, that. No sooner has Isabelle given birth to Joan than Jacques d'Arc turns up to remind her than she's supposed to be fleeing with the rest of Domrémy before the Burgundians arrive, not lazing around having babies, and he grabs infant Joan to get rid of her. Isabelle is understandably not pleased with this plan and refuses to let Jacques dispose of their daughter. Thank you, Isabelle! She keeps her child, we keep our heroine, and years of tension between Joan and her father are set in motion, particularly as Joan grows up headstrong and outspoken. Jacques d'Arc is rarely so high profile a character in Joan's life as he is here, and there is a notable undercurrent of "trade the father who doesn't approve for the Father who does" in this Joan's journey, though both of them are willing to sacrifice her if they must. Poor Joan.
Joan has her first vision in church when she's about ten, but they don't disturb her life until seven years later, after the Burgundians have (again) ransacked her village and killed her boy-sidekick (played by Joan of Arcadia's Teen God!). As she weeps in the rain and rages at the heavens, golden light and sparklies pour down on her, and it really is rather startling to see such a blatant representation of heavenly selection after years of oblique visual references and symbolic coding. It's an interesting choice, and one which Leelee's Joan promptly brings back to earth in Vaucouleurs, as she spends her time calming babies, bonding with nuns and fortifying the city walls. This Joan has common sense, a way with people, and some amount of military savvy. She heads off for Chinon with some new boy-sidekicks, acquiring as she goes a sword from a church dedicated to St. Catherine, in a rarely-filmed episode from the historical Joan's legend. It's a beautiful scene, with firelight flickering across the sword and a painting of the saint, reflecting on Leelee's lovely face. But sadly we must leave it to meet Neil Patrick Harris's Dauphin, far too young for the part but not bad overall, and Peter O'Toole's Cauchon. Cauchon isn't usually introduced until much later in the story, often not before Joan's trial begins, but O'Toole is so good that the extra time with him is appreciated. His Cauchon can almost believe in Joan, but not quite, and he's deeply wary of the potential for disorder she presents. Educate her, place her in a convent, channel her energies into forms he can understand, and he'll have uses for her fine mind and her strong faith. But as she is, her dangers outweigh her virtues.
The miniseries seems to have used up all of its complexity on Cauchon, since the only one of Joan's captains we get is La Hire (Peter Strauss), and he's a cowboy who goes around hollering, "Glasdale, this tower ain't big enough for the both of us!" Okay, not in those exact words. There's some interesting tension between Joan and La Hire before he learns to trust her mysterious military insight, but mostly I found him irritating. Ah well. Joan is directly involved in planning the attack on Orléans, and she does her usual bold leading-of-the-troops deal, but when she's wounded, it's not even meant for her. Instead of being shot while climbing the walls, like usual, she rides her horse forward to intercept the arrow aimed at her boy-sidekick. Again, it's a slightly odd choice, but I guess this soldier-Joan, while heroic and self-sacrificing, isn't careless enough to make herself a target accidentally.
Her military savvy unfortunately doesn't extend to courtly politics, where she chooses her battles poorly. She confronts Charles about his treaties during a banquet, and follows that by getting into a doctrinal argument with Cauchon, tipping the royal scales against them both. This Joan is cast off when her usefulness has passed not because she's embarrassing and can be easily isolated, like Bergman's and Seberg's, but because she's too caught up in the military aspect of her mission. She sees only the battles of the war, and not the politics, and so she's a liability. For some reason, though, the miniseries strives to soften our reaction to Joan's capture by letting her be aware it's coming. Her Voices tell her (and she tells us) that Charles will betray her. When he sets her up, she hints at her knowledge just enough that he offers her an out, which she then refuses to take. They both still have their parts to play, she reminds him. I suppose the logic was that it's easier for the audience to forgive Charles if Joan has already forgiven him, and that her fate will be less traumatic (again, for the audience) if she's seen accepting it, in the same way that the "and now she's a saint" opening of the Bergman version softens the tragic ending. Not that this sort of structure is necessarily effective, of course...
So Joan is captured and imprisoned. She's briefly made a noble pet and offered the chance to continue her education, courtly life and "manly pursuits" in exchange for leading Burgundy's armies, but of course she refuses, and we come to her trial and the face-off with Cauchon. O'Toole's Cauchon is a formidable opponent who'd gladly burn her to save her, but Leelee's Joan is no more meek here than she was when facing her father. She's aggressively stubborn in her testimony, and her abjuration, when it comes, is brief. She plans to go down fighting. Sadly for Joan, in this version the often-present threat/actuality of rape at the hands of her guards is made as explicit as it ever is, and she's left shattered (only in Jeanne la Pucelle: Les prisons is this theme presented as openly, though it is implied in some of the other versions). She's still a warrior, but it's now an effort for her to rally enough to retract her abjuration. Only at the moment of her death does she come back to life, thanking her Voices as the flames surround her.
And finally, Joan on TV.
