Jeanne la Pucelle I – Les Batailles (1994) - film review

Upon hearing a message from God, a young French maid, Jeanne, feels compelled to leave her home in Domremy.    She finally manages to get an audience with Charles, the dauphin of France, and she persuades him that it is her destiny to lead the French to victory against the English.   Reluctantly, Charles puts her in charge of his troops and, at a decisive battle, Jeanne’s courage and faith in God win her a first historic victory.

At first sight, Jacques Rivette’s sprawling five and a half hour account of the life and death of Joan of Arc would appear to be a radical departure for a director who is more closely associated with intimate, contemplative dramas than large canvas historical epics.  Yet this admirable relic of the French New Wave defies our expectations and, with his characteristic insight and economy, delivers a work which feels more like a natural progression of, rather than an eccentric digression from, what has gone before.  His Jeanne la Pucelle is a thoughtful, incisive and darkly ironic study of the most important and enigmatic woman in French history.   Whilst it may not add much to what has already been said on the subject, it does at least make an absorbing piece of film drama.

Of course this is not the first time that the Joan of Arc story has been emblazoned across the screen, and it certainly will not be the last.  The most celebrated film rendition of the tragic fate of the Maid of Orleans is unquestionably Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent masterpiece, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc.  This film, along with Robert Bresson’s highly regarded Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962), concentrates on Joan’s trial and execution.  In his Saint Joan (1957), Otto Preminger made an attempt to show us the military exploits of the French heroine, but failed on account of the severe budgetary restrictions.  The only film to date that convincingly portrays Joan of Arc’s famous battles is Luc Besson’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), although this film falls down in virtually every other department.  

Rivette’s Jeanne la Pucelle lies between the poetic abstraction of Dreyer’s film and the period realism of Besson’s.   Whilst a great deal of effort has clearly gone into achieving historical authenticity, the film’s few action sequences, in this, the first part of the epic diptych, are disappointing.  The attack on what is supposed to be the town of Orleans (but which is obviously a small run-down castle somewhere in the middle of the French countryside) by a dozen or so unconvincing warriors looks more like a heat in It’s a Knockout (or should that be Jeux sans frontières?) than a serious recreation of the historical event.  Sensibly, Rivette keeps the action scenes to a minimum, although you can’t help wondering that the film would have worked even better if they had been cut out completely.

So, given that the action scenes are so uninspiring and/or comical, is it worth bothering with the first part of Rivette’s film?  Should we not just skip it and go straight onto the second part, Les Prisons, which deals with Joan’s confinement and martyrdom?   The answer has to be a categorical no, as the first installment offers far, far more than just a few shoddy battle scenes. Les Batailles is an essential lead-up to the second half of the story.  It reveals to us the young Joan’s unfaltering certainty in her calling and her ability to inspire confidence in others, without which her achievements would not have come about and without which her tragic fate would have little significance.  This first part establishes Joan as an ordinary young woman, belying the more familiar warrior and saint-like portrayals, and this is where the film’s power lies.

As you would perhaps expect from a Jacques Rivette film, it is the more restrained, quieter passages that are the most moving and compelling.  The scenes in which Joan decides to cut her hair (appropriately doing so by using a breastplate as an improvised mirror) and learns to write her name are peripheral to the story and yet say so much about the character and help to establish her as an ordinary, frail human being.  Rivette’s economical mise-en-scène serves the subject of the film well, effectively conveying the austerity and brutality of the era in which the story takes place, as well as giving greater focus to its central character.

What is perhaps most striking about Rivette’s interpretation is that his Joan is so ordinary and easy to engage with.  Sandrine Bonnaire’s portrayal is that of a typical, down-to-Earth girl who just happens to know she is God’s champion.  She is strong-willed, feisty and brave, and yet she feels both physical and emotional pain as keenly as any young woman of her age.   The reality of battle is almost more than she can bear to see, she genuinely believes she will die when an arrow pierces her chest, and yet something within her drives her on, an unswerving belief in her calling.  No one knows for certain just how it was that an uneducated teenage girl was able to galvanise armies of men to defeat the English, but a combination of her human qualities and her divine certitude certainly played a role.  Bonnaire may be a little too old for the part (the real-life Joan was a mere 19 when she was captured and tried) and yet her performance is spot on, convincingly evoking both her character’s vulnerability and her iron-willed resolution, her humanity and her indomitable spirit.  Whatever shortcomings the film may have are more than made up for by the arresting performance of its lead actress.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?