Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont, 2019)

The story of Joan of Arc is a standard of the repertoire, the French cinema equivalent of Beethoven's Ninth. It has been performed so many times by so many different people that everyone knows it by heart. So the fundamental purpose of going through this story is for a director to put his or her unique stamp on the material, while also paying homage to the various versions that have come before. In the most basic sense, making a Joan of Arc film is a self-conscious engagement with the history of the medium.

As Jacques Rivette did almost 25 years ago to the day, Bruno Dumont has given us a diptych, the first film, Jeannette, depicting the early childhood of Joan, and the second, Jeanne, showing her preparing for battle, running afoul of English and French authorities, and undergoing a protracted trial at the hands of the Catholic Church. Jeannette was the more genre-busting effort, employing bizarre excursions into rock and heavy metal music, headbanging nuns and a dabbing shepherd's apprentice. Dumont chose to depict young Joan's rebellion in the manner of adolescent petulance and the irrepressibility of burgeoning, half-understood impulses. In his second film, Dumont takes a different tack, subtler but equally bold.

Various soldiers and church functionaries are reluctantly taking their orders from Joan (Lise Leplat Prudhomme), now a bit older but still a young girl. They too want the English removed from France, but the king (Fabrice Luchini) is more interested in striking a compromise and ending the fighting. Joan is now a bit of a bratty know-it-all, casually dressing down elders and career soldiers who try to argue with the plans she believes have been dictated to her directly from God. The fact that the fighting is going badly in no way shakes her faith that she is doing the right thing. Dumont's Joan is every inch a teenager, unwilling to brook disagreement, twisting even contradictory evidence into further proof of her own infallible judgment.

The first half of Joan of Arc is staged, like the majority of the first film, in open fields and upon hilltops, providing a rugged, sunlit environment that feels suitably outside of historical time. Joan is free in these moments, under the sky and protected by her own connection to the Lord. In the second half of the film, Dumont initiates the trial, which occurs indoors at Reims Cathedral, and there is a visceral shock when the film goes inside, lowering the Church's vaulted ceilings and enclosed authority over Joan's open, unmediated access to God.

Dumont is working from Charles Peguy's play, which also served as the basis for a TV movie in 1973. But much of the material is drawn from the church transcripts, so it will be familiar to the viewer from earlier films. It is at this point that Joan of Arc is most obviously in dialogue with Carl Theodor Dryer and Robert Bresson, and it is in Dumont's differences from those films that he really asserts his directorial signature. Like Dreyer, Dumont explores the power of close-ups during the trial, but his cast of mostly non-professional actors provide an entirely new sense of frisson. Several of the judges, meant to embody the lofty authority of the church, are haggard, slack-jawed, and goggle-eyed, the sorts of Lille peasants who typically populate Dumont's films. One of the key examiners has a pronounced speech impediment, but is treated by the others as a revered equal. It is he who breaks protocol by asking of Joan, "are you in a state of grace?"

But most importantly, Dumont stages the trial, and all the peripheral matters around Joan's arrest and execution -- the torturer, the jailers, the bailiff -- as issues of reluctant bureaucracy. While there is an English examiner who is anxious to speed things along and burn the "witch," all the French church officials are solicitous, giving Joan every opportunity to recant, apologize, accept the dictates of the church, and avoid death. None of them want to execute her. But she insists on the holy diktat of her mission, and refuses to tell them what God said to her. "That is none of your concern!" So, unlike the bloodthirsty judges of Dreyer, or the unmoved functionaries of Bresson, Dumont gives us an almost Wiseman-like view of the Catholic Church, people reluctantly tasked with a partly theological, partly political problem.

Dumont is not against Joan, but he does show that her insistence on dying at the stake is consistent with the impetuousness of youth. Joan of Arc is the logical second part to Jeannette in the sense that the first film celebrates the brash, uncontrolled will to rebel, and this second film shows the consequences when that lawless rebellion smacks up against the reality principle. The men who sit in judgment of Joan are no less authoritarian or patriarchal in Dumont's telling of the story. Their charge is to protect their own establishment rule. But there is a stately, mournful quality that suffuses Joan of Arc, in the sense that everyone finds themselves in their assigned place, no one except the accused seems to want to be there, and the accumulated wisdom of old age is ultimately powerless to save a child -- saintly or deluded -- from herself.