Countless masters of cinema have tried their hand at the historic Joan of Arc story, including Carl Theodor Dreyer, Victor Fleming, Robert Bresson and Jacques Rivette. Any of these filmmakers would make for a tough act to follow, but that didn’t dissuade Bruno Dumont from realizing his own take on the material, “Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc,” premiering in the Director’s Fortnight program of the Cannes Film Festival. Reimagining the story as a revisionist musical and produced for French television, Dumont is clearly intent on keep audiences on their toes as he moves further away from his Bresson-imitating roots. While that hook might have cinephiles salivating, Dumont’s power metal Bible study shouldn’t have made it out of the church basement, let alone receive a headlining slot at the Cannes sidebar.
Each half of “Jeannette” amounts to one broad narrative beat, setting the film up as a threadbare rock ’n’ roll prequel to the Joan of Arc stories with which cinema audiences are familiar. Over the course of the first portion, the younger Jeannette (Lise Leplat Prudhomme) comes to terms with her overwhelming empathy towards the human suffering brought about by the war with the English. In the second half, the character (now three years older and played by Jeanne Voisin) comes of age when she firmly decides to leave her childhood home and lead the French to battle. Neither actress makes a big impression, with the caveat that the older Jeannette — at this point christened Jean — is at least a better singer. Only a few supporting players are brought in, with each one more cringingly silly than the last, including twins Aline Charles and Elise Charles both playing nun Madame Gervaise (singular, although always on screen at the same time).
On the technical side of the production, the playbook for “Jeannette” is adapted verbatim from a pair of turn-of-the-century novels written by Charles Péguy, while the music is composed by French electro-pop act IGORRR. According to Dumont, the artist was chosen for ability to “switch in a second from Scarlatti to heavy metal.” As far as this style concerns ‘Jeannette,’ the composer’s repetitive schtick is mostly set to “headbang” with a few softer moments interspersed.
Each song offers up a few power chords, some double-bass drumming and dance breakdowns, but — indispensable for a musical — no single track stands out, with each musical moment blending in with the next as they cycle through a grab bag of sonic stunts. Dumont’s most popular French predecessor in the “wall of sound” approach to the genre is “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (albeit a tenuous pairing, otherwise). However, the success of Jacques Demy’s film is built in part on the vitality of a handful its score’s themes, and comparing the two it’s clear IGORRR brings nothing of the like to ‘Jeannette.’
Dumont’s fidelity to Péguy’s classic works has drawn comparisons to the challenging corpus of directing duo Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The pair is known for their exacting use of music and treatment of history, and the director of “Jeannette” acknowledges Straub-Hullet’s “Moses and Aaron” as an antecedent to his own use of live sound during production. The feat might have been an impressive technical accomplishment if the poetry of the lyrics weren’t washed away in the noise before any meaning might take hold. By that token, the cumulative effect of the music and lyrics suggests about as much substance as one would expect from a local Christian hardcore band. It’s unclear exactly what Dumont wishes to accomplish by resurrecting Joan of Arc and drawing upon the nationalistic sentiment that the historical figure signifies, particularly at such an uneasy political moment. It comes off as just another shallow provocation, and one tailor-made for French audiences.
Visually, ‘Jeannette’ is painfully static; most of the film is set on a sparse beach — the director’s native Calais standing in for Domremy—with the odd interaction taking place in a forest or, for a few scenes at the very end, the interior of the principal character’s home. Dumont doesn’t seem oblivious to the tedium of the locations; with a wink to the audience, on-screen text after every ellipsis reminds the viewer that the action is still set in the same place despite the temporal jump. Intentional or otherwise, the limited variety of sets makes the TV origins of ‘Jeannette’ painfully apparent and leads the whole affair to feel longer than Dumont’s four-hour miniseries “Li’l Quinquin.”
‘Jeannette’ may appeal to fans of Dumont’s recent work, which operates in a more adventurous and less dour vein. However, those that couldn’t tolerate the uneasy collision of slapstick and brutality in “Li’l Quinquin” and “Slack Bay” ought to stay far, far away; there is nothing appealing about this unbearable effort. Paring down his cinematic toolkit (conceivably a consequence of the budget or production schedule), Dumont’s uncompromising approach to the material makes for a love-it-or-hate-it affair, and it should be clear where this particular viewer fell on that spectrum. It’s hard to imagine a worse film to be found at Cannes this year, but lucky for local French audiences who catch this one on TV, they can just change the channel. [F]
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