Visualizing religious themes has become a common idea of movies these days. One of the latest big productions to do so is the French movie, "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc."
Over the years, the story of Joan/Jeanne D'Arc has inspired many motion pictures. Three of them are especially well known; Carl Dreyer's classic silent movie, "The Passion of Joan of Arc," made in 1928; Victor Fleming's 1948 version of that; and Otto Preminger's 1957 "Saint Joan." Luc Besson's latest version is the most extended and expensive telling of the story.
Besson's approach is considerably different than that of his many predecessors. Typically, filmmakers have taken Joan's divine inspiration as a given - it is the foundation upon which a melodrama of greed, corruption, and unshakable faith is built. Besson, however, questions the nature of Jeanne's revelations and the voices that impart them to her. While the possibility is left open that God has spoken to the peasant girl, Besson allows (and perhaps encourages) an alternative interpretation - that Joan's religious fervor is the result of paranoid schizophrenia. Are her actions prompted by faith or insanity?
As is often true of French-made films (as opposed to their Hollywood counterparts), The Messenger's adherence to history is good (although, as with all narrative features, a certain amount of dramatic license has been taken). Joan was born in 1412 in Domrémy, France, when much of her country was occupied by the English army (during the so-called "Hundred Years War"). The movie first introduces her in 1420, when an English raiding party attacks Joan's village and kills her sister. Already hearing voices that she believes to be of divine inspiration, she is sent off to live with an aunt and uncle while her parents attempt to rebuild their home.
When next we meet Joan, she is 17 years old and is seeking an audience with France's uncrowned king, Charles VII. Charles is so impressed by Joan's intensity that he believes her claim that God has chosen her to "save France from its enemies and bring it back into the hand of God." He gives her an army and allows her to attack the English at Orléans, where she wins a great victory. She becomes an immediate French folk hero, and is at Charles VII's side when he is crowned in July of 1429.
A year later, after a failed attempt to re-take Paris, England's Burgundian allies outside the walls of Compiègne capture Joan. She is transported to Rouen, where she is imprisoned and tortured before being brought before an ecclesiastical tribunal. The result of her trial for heresy and witchcraft is a guilty verdict. The penalty is to be burned at the stake.
Despite impeccable production design, stunning cinematography, and a rousing score, "The Messenger" proves to be a little flat. The battle sequences are humdrum and routine; they take up a lot of screen time without involving the audience. Besson makes frequent use of quick cuts to emphasize the chaos of war (and to limit the amount of gore), but this style becomes tiresome after a while, especially when so few recognizable characters are in harm's way. Most of the time, we're watching faceless combatants hack at each other. The film looks great (as one would expect from the director of "La Femme Nikita" and "The Fifth Element," both handsome productions), but in terms of intensity and spectacle, what we're given here is just a pale shadow of "Bravehart."
Paradoxically, "The Messenger" is both too long and too short. The film contains several dead patches that make the 2 1/2 hour running time feel excessive. On the other hand, the choppy editing leaves the viewer with the sense that significant chunks of footage were left on the cutting room floor. There are times when "The Messenger's" transition jumps are not only disconcerting, but also create more than a momentary sense of confusion about what's going on.
"The Messenger" becomes the latest foreign production to film in English using a primarily British and American cast in order to secure seamless worldwide distribution. Most of the "big name" stars - Malkovich, Hoffman, and Faye Dunaway (playing Charles VII's manipulative mother-in-law, Yolande D'Aragon) - have limited screen time and don't give exceptional performances. It's left up to supporting actors like Tchéky Karyo (as the French commander at Orléans), Richard Ridings (as one of Joan's faithful men), and Timothy West (as the head of the ecclesiastical tribunal) to do the real thespian work.
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 gewgaws 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 things that are smashed - at regular intervals - into various heads, torsos and limbs.
Luc Besson's, "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc" labors under the misapprehension that Joan's life is a war story and takes place largely on battlefields. In fact, it takes place almost entirely within the consciences of everyone involved. The movie does at least concede that a good part of Joan's legend involves her trial for heresy and her burning at the stake, and these scenes may prove educational for the test audience members who wrote on their sneak preview cards, "Why does she have to die at the end?"
Besson's "The Messenger" may remind us Muslims of the question of "The Messenger (Ar-Rissala)," made by Mustafa Al-Akkad. Although there is a huge difference between the two movies, culturally and religiously, we have to wonder why Al-Akkad's experience stopped while Hollywood and western studios continue producing Judeo-Christian-based movies?
