Jeanne la Pucelle I - Les Batailles [Joan the Maid 1: The Battles] (1994)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk)

The general style of this fascinating epic is oddly, yet appropriately, silent. Sandrine BONNAIRE is too old for the part of a teenager, yet she is perfectly believable as a tomboy general. In any case, it is hard to imagine an actual teenaged actress being anywhere near as good as Bonnaire. And she has to be good because if this were not a true story it would be very hard to believe an illiterate teenage girl would be given an army of 12,000 men to command against the English.

Psychologically astute and emotionally unadorned, as any tale of a simple virgin should be, Jeanne has a very strong sense of her own destiny, but not of how, exactly, to achieve it. Yet, she feels she has no choice but to rise to the historical occasion. Her eventual trial and execution for heresy and sorcery is the typically-hypocritical religious policy of demanding evidence for the religious visions of others while offering none but the auditor’s faith for their own.

Religious as well as political in its content and context, the film’s numinous implications are well-handled in terms of the need to fulfil ones destiny in order to be happy; the only caveat being that the movie is a little too long for its own good.

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