Related articles and links |  1 of 4

The French ecclesiastics delegated by the occupying English power to the thankless chore of determining whether Joan of Arc was an imposter or a heretic guided by Satan would love The Messenger. Director Luc Besson attempts to prove what even the best prosecuting clerics of her day could not: that Joan was a demented, misled, hysterical, confused, and guilt-ridden phony; but, even with the power and money of Sony and Gaumont behind him, he is no more convincing than the inquisitors of Rouen.

In the movie, the historical record of perhaps the most documented trial from the medieval era is mostly ignored. Among other things, we are never told that Joan heard voices from and saw specific saints (Margaret, Catherine and Michael). This is not conjecture. This is what Joan herself said under grueling cross-examination over a period of months. Why then is this never said in the film? Instead, the film presents her voices as nothing more than the wind and the clouds.

Nowhere is Joan recorded as saying anything of the sort. But, these filmmakers are not interested at all in taking Joan at her own words, nor in the testimony of anyone else who knew her as transcribed in voluminous first hand accounts in the trial of rehabilitation conducted just twenty years after her execution. The difference between a story of a young girl visited by specific saints and one who witnesses wind and clouds is the difference between the real-life Joan of Arc and the fictitious marionette of this film.

Not content with ignoring the facts, the film invents its own. It begins with the child Joan witnessing the brutal murder and rape (in that order) of her sister Catherine by marauding English soldiers. There is no evidence in the historical record that this ever happened, and in any case, it was not English soldiers who ransacked Domremy, but Burgundians from the other side of the river Meuse.

Aside from the fundamental responsibility of any artist to strive for the truth, why does this matter? It matters because with the subtlety of a poleaxe the filmmakers are desperate to provide the young Joan with "motivation." Revenge, the all-purpose motivator of nineties movies!

This gratuitously violent and graphically filmed scene (qualifying the film for an R rating, thereby keeping young people away from a story about a young person) is followed by a scene with a priest in which she rails at God for permitting these atrocities. There were many horrors that took place in the Hundred Years War, and much reason to rage at both God and man, but this made-up incident wasn't one of them. When a film is founded on a lie, and a perverse one at that, nothing that follows can be trusted.

In the case of The Messenger, a true story of love and sacrifice, of dedication and faith, is reduced by the morphing of skillful cinematic hacks to a false one of hatred, bitterness, fury, and revenge. How was this incredible revelation overlooked by playwrights Shaw, Schiller, Anouilh, Peguy, Brecht, and Anderson; historians Duby, Pernoud, Michelet, Warner, Contamine, and Luce; novelists Twain, Tournier, Vioux, and Keneally; and, filmmakers Dryer, Gastinet, DeMille, Fleming, Preminger, and Rivet?

So what are we to make of all this nonsense? Perhaps this is a New Age, windy, cloudy Joan, one who not only never names her saints but doesn't ever say the names Mary or Jesus, even though she had these names sewn into her banner and regularly prayed. It would be too insulting to New Age philosophers, however, to posit this Joan in those terms, because New Age philosophies are deeper and more sophisticated than the simple-minded imagery of this film.

next page... |  1 of 4

November 15 1999, Vol. 43, No. 13