Joan of Arc

Anyone who is knowledgeable about the history of Jeanne the maid of Lorraine will be puzzled by this torpid representation of her ordeal.

The casting is baffling. A 10 year old plays Jeanne, who was 19. The wonderful Fabrice Luchini, a man in his late 60's, plays King Charles, a man in his mid 20's. Apart from Luchini, most of the cast are dreadfully wooden. The camera work is perfunctory at best. The first 40 minutes is excruciatingly slow and shot mostly in sand dunes near the English Channel / La Manche. We are expected to suspend disbelief enough to imagine this variously represents the vicinity just outside Paris or in the garden of the Château de la Trémouille. A battle scene consists of about two dozen cast on horseback performing an equine dance routine. The dialogue appears to be straight from a play this film was based on. Exposition by announcing characters as we watch them trudge through the sand is amateurish beyond belief. The editor must have been high when this section of the film was cut. Incredibly long passages of nothing happening.

I gave up around the 35 minute mark, and a day later was about to write a review when I thought to be fair I should watch the movie in its entirety first and try to fathom how it achieved the awards it received. So I sat and watched the rest.

Around the 40 minute mark the locations shift to inside Amiens cathedral which provides some photographic interest and gradually the dialogue picks up. I assume the dialogue is from Jeanne's trial. Towards the end of the film, Jeanne's prison in Rouen is a WWII bunker in the middle of nowhere.

The budget for this film is supposedly EUR1,500,000. I can't see what it was spent on. The money would have been better spent shooting the stage play with no other pretensions.

'Cahiers du Cinéma' named Jeanne (Joan of Arc) the 5th best film of 2019. I assume they only saw 5 films. The French film industry is better than this.

This film has a certain look and feel which can be described as cheap and tedious. So don't bother with this one. You will only be exasperated that you wasted over 2 hours for nothing.