Retrospective: Jeanne la Pucelle (1993)
Part one: The Battles Part two: The Prisons
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Starring Sandrine Bonnaire
In French with English subtitles
Rivette’s version of the life of Jeanne the Maiden has just now been made available on videocassette to the American public, a move that certainly has something to do with the recent release of Luc Besson’s $58 million epic. The two movies are poles apart; but then Jeanne has always been something of a blank slate, inviting a wide variety of interpretations. Ingrid Bergman’s Joan was a saint (sainte avant d’etre sainte), Besson’s half-crazy Jeanne an unguided missile. Rivette’s Jeanne is the girl next door.
The first one of Rivette’s paired films, The Battles, begins in Valcouleurs, the first stage in her journey, where Jeanne waits and waits. And waits. The local captain ignores her, tells her to go home, tells her she should have her ears boxed. But mostly he just ignores her. It’s an unpromising beginning to a four-hour brace of films, as Sandrine Bonnaire stands around doing nothing in front of a static camera. Patience is rewarded though, both Jeanne’s and the viewer’s. The story builds slowly, but gradually a sense of Jeanne’s character develops. This movie will sneak up on you; I found it engaging, despite the slow start. One big problem in portraying this character lies in answering the question, why did anyone listen to her or believe her? It’s a dilemma that puts a nearly impossible burden on any actress portraying Jeanne. Bonnaire’s Jeanne answers that question on the first night of the journey to Chinon. Two of the men accompanying her plan to rape her as they lie together sleeping. But when they wake up in the middle of the night, they are nervous at being in the middle of enemy territory, and they find that they really don’t have the stomach to carry out their plan. Jeanne wakes up too, and it is she who reassures them. They are impressed; they’re taken with her. So too is the viewer. It’s very nicely done. This Jeanne is calm and down-to-earth. She is prone to girlish giggling fits. Her ordinariness is appealing. For all her courage, faith, and commitment, it is her ordinariness that always shines through.
When she is wounded at the Tourelles, she cries. Although the wound is slight, it hurts, and she’s frightened that she will die. It’s a natural reaction. No heroics here; she doesn’t yank out the arrow and make a joke. She’s not nuts. She is neither saint nor hero, but an eighteen year old girl.
The Battles is an unfortunate choice of title for the first film. Hampered by a small budget, the battles at Orleans are barely sketched in. Filmed with perhaps twenty extras, they border on the absurd. The second film, The Prisons, covers the extended period of her imprisonment, and explores her curious relationship with Joan of Luxemborg. Joan was the aunt of the nobleman whose prisoner Jeanne was, and she protected Jeanne until her death in 1430. Only then was Jeanne sold to the English; her nephew was apparently afraid to deliver Jeanne while his aunt lived.
Curiously, Jeanne’s trial is almost entirely left out; the story is picked up again at her sentencing. Under threat of death, she signs the renunciation and is returned to prison There she is tricked into resuming men’s dress, which provides the pretext for her execution. When she learns she is to be burned as a relapsed heretic, she tears her hair, cries, and begs for pity. It is an affecting scene. It stands in marked contrast to the stagy artificiality of the Ingrid Bergman version. Bergman’s Jeanne faced her end with absurd stoicism, almost welcoming death by fire as a small price to pay for sainthood.
History records that Jeanne’s final words as the flames reached her were “Jesus!� There are lots of ways of calling out “Jesus,� and the way the scene is handled pretty much sums up Dryer’s, Besson’s, and Rivette’s films on the life and death of the Pucelle. Bergman’s Jeanne spoke it calmly, as a prayer. Milla Jovovich’s cries are inaudible, unheeded by a nonexistent God. Sandrine Bonnaire screams “Jesus!� like a girl who is being burned alive.
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