Joan of Arc is not a new subject for a movie: she has been played by Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg and Renée Jeanne Falconetti. The most acclaimed version of the story is Carl Dreyer’s intense, austere 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc, which focuses on her trial and execution, and regularly gets voted into lists of the 100 greatest movies of all time. Otto Preminger’s 1957 Saint Joan, using Graham Greene’s adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play, is usually judged an interesting failure.
Luc Besson, one of the star directors (Big Blue, Leon, The Fifth Element) of what was briefly and vaguely thought of as a post-Diva French New New Wave, must have thought it was time to take a new and flashier look at the mysterious peasant woman who, guided by
visions, led the demoralised French armies of 1429 to some striking victories against the English invaders before being betrayed, branded a heretic and burnt at the stake two years later. Fair enough; it’s a good story. It’s just a pity Besson has nothing new to say about her.
Milla Jovovich (of The Fifth Element fame) plays Joan. We get a brutal prelude to show us what might have driven her religious mania, though it’s not nearly enough to truly explain her, if that were possible. Jovovich has presence, she’s sexy – especially when she gets her hair cut soldier-style – and looks good in a suit of armour. She is convincing when hectoring an army into battle. When Joan is on trial, however, and suffering coruscating self-doubt, Jovovich can only manage to look terminally confused.
John Malkovich acquits himself well as the petulant Charles VII, whom Joan helped get crowned, and so does Faye Dunaway as his manipulative mother-in-law, but the scenes of political intrigue come across like Reader’s Digest versions of those other monarchic French machinations in La Reine Margot. Charles’s generals are a mildly interesting bunch, though often they seem to be playing it rather casually for laughs.
The battles are the best thing in the movie, muddy, gory and exciting. We could, however, have done without the episode in which Joan gets an arrow in the chest and has to yank it out in the style of the hero in one of those butch old westerns. We even get a variation of it later. As for her visions, Besson overplays his hand of visual tricks: they are laughable, their turbulently rushing skies more suited to a heavy metal pop video. And surely Besson could have made a bit more of an effort to find a passably attractive Jesus for Joan to commune with.
By the time she’s on trial and is being visited by a phantasmic and voice-distorted Dustin Hoffman as The Conscience, the purpose being to embody her inner conflicts about her role and actions, it is clear the movie has entirely lost the plot. What might have seemed a good idea in the script just looks tediously obvious on film, and when poor Joan eventually gets incinerated one can only sigh with sad relief that her – and our – torments are finally over. We, unfortunately, don’t have sainthood to look forward to.