Jeannette - Joan of Arc Movie MUSICAL!

Jeannette’s Joyful Noise Drowns out the Banality of A Quiet Place

Bruno Dumont’s rock-musical passion play is a true original, unlike Krasinski’s warmed-over horror flick.
Originality is what’s missing from recent hit movies Black Panther, Ready Player One, and A Quiet Place, which makes Bruno Dumont’s Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc instantly stimulating: The story of France’s patron saint who was martyred during the Hundred Years’ War is told through the joyful noise of a heavy-metal musical.
Dumont, who always challenges audience expectations, first challenges himself in films that test narrative conventions by mixing drama and comedy, tragic realism and the ineffable — usually with particular interest in examining religious faith (as in his 1997 debut, The Life of Jesus, about modern-day French juvenile delinquents). Going beyond commercial Hollywood and most secular European art films, Dumont exposes the emptiness of junk such as Black Panther, Ready Player One, and A Quiet Place. Those hits distract audiences from thinking, and their popularity suggests that moviegoers have become accustomed to not thinking (the key problem with A Quiet Place, which I address below). Dumont’s headbanger Joan is an immediately thought-provoking showpiece.
 First presented as a tween (played by Lise Leplat Prudhomme), then as an adolescent verging on womanhood (played by Jeanne Voisin), Joan sings to hard-rock strains played by an unseen band (French musician Gautier Serre who goes by the name Igorrr). That novelty is striking enough, in the vein of ’70s post-hippie musicals Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, but Dumont is primarily a cinema provocateur. He starts with musical artifice then immediately makes you see the vernal countryside of 1425 France, where the young shepherdess contemplates the war and her place in God’s scheme, as the site of a performance. Several religious genres intersect: the juvenile pageant, the passion play, the religious bio-pic, and the mystical art movie. The panoply is Dumont’s method of calling upon the spectator’s sophistication, which places Jeannette far ahead of this year’s banal crowd-pleasers.
Not an artificially polished movie-musical, Jeannette mixes professionalism and amateurism. The future Maid of Orléans dances about barefoot to synthesizer beats and guitar riffs — a mix of modern and primitive that also comment on childhood purity and innocent imaginings that then touch upon divine inspiration. The first of Joan’s miraculous visions occurs when she encounters Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael suspended near a tree and they sing to her in simple three-part harmony.

These acts of devotion and revelation have a rough charm, but not even Jeannette’s cartwheels, or her uncle’s crude breakdancing, are exactly cute. Although they sing and dance in states of ecstasy (Voisin’s headbanging tresses unfurl like Metallica’s in their music video One), they are resolute and serious about their hard lives during a time of war when their sense of obligation and personal belief are fraught. (Most songs mention suffering, perdition, and the will to “kill war.”) It is this anguished, difficult consciousness that gives the movie its surprising Millennial pertinence. Dumont reinvents the Joan of Arc story as an allegory for our contemporary circumstances and an argument against the spiritual trap of agnostic doubt. When the prescient child sings that “Hell is spilling onto earth,” it is the most effective expression of our current moral and political chaos to be found in any form of popular culture so far this year.