To go into the mysteries of history is thrilling

Rating: 10/10 (9 January 2007)

This DVD, like the film, might not be a masterpiece. This DVD, like the film, might not be everlasting. This DVD, like the film, might not be like a good wine that improves with decades of aging or a good cheese that gets finer and finer with weeks and months of patient loving care in some cool cave or cellar. But this film is the most inevitable and unfathomable film of many years, just like the book it has grown out of, just like the DVD now with its extra 25 minutes and its two hours of extra resources. Don't ever try to watch it in French. It has to be watched and enjoyed in English, that is to say in its multilingual version : English, French, Italian and Latin. It has to be appreciated in its shooting language to enjoy the subtle finesse of the contrasting accents of the actors and actresses. The French actors and actresses are nicely airing some kind of light French flavoring, while the Americans and English actors and actresses are mesmerising and hypnotising us with the two mid-Atlantic and British linguistic brothers, though avoiding the Scottish cousin that could have sprinkled the end with its gravelly roughness. You will enjoy the scenery : the Louvre of course, but also Westminster Abbey, which is revealed in the DVD as being nothing but Lincoln's cathedral (a film is the ultimate illusion but a DVD is the ultimate revelation), Saint Sulpice's and Rosslyn's Chapel, Place de la Concorde and various Triumph Arks (an allusion to the albino Noah's ark ?), the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, the French police and their distant cousins from Scotland Yard, the nicely sectarian Opus Dei and the just as much sectarian anti-religious French spirit. You will let yourself dive and delve deep into the mysteries and the riddles, the enigmas and the secret codes, just for the fun of a nice red apple that you will get at the end of the game and present to your teacher in divinities, Dan Brown or Tom Hanks who are benedictally brown nosing with us and maybe with the catholic church. You will discover a crypt under Rosslyn Chapel that the Saint Clair owners refuse to acknowledge. Maybe it does not exist. You will imagine a crypt under the Louvre's inverted pyramid that President Mitterrand secretly buried as a homage to the Merovingian kings (since he believed he was the new King of France), to Jesus Christ who has always inspired French politicians who are obviously sacrificing their many lives to the cross of politics, to the masonic pyramid of the famous greenback dreamt by Benjamin Franklin when he was strolling along the Seine river as the first US ambassador to Paris a couple of centuries ago, and Mitterrand has always imagined himself as being God in person, the father of that poor Jesus. You will in your turn dream of Mary Magdalene, the chalice of a promise, Jesus Christ, the silice of a Passion, and Leonardo Da Vinci, the most ambiguous vision and smile of a Mona Lisa who has forever captivated the attention of the world's past present and future innumerable generations. You will probably never get an answer to all your questions but at least you will get the questions and be able to store them in the back of your mind, in some drawer in the portmanteau of your brain. Enjoy the trip and intensify it with a dose of claustrophobia, if you can get one from some street dealer of quick extra-terrestrial pleasures in some Parisian park or garden for the pathetic sum of fifty euros (I defy you to find a junky ready to sell you his equipment for the miserable sum of fifty euros, even in the Bois de Boulogne). And the DVD will not answer any question but will add some more mysteries and secrets to the list of all those you have already accumulated through the book, the film and now the extended version of the DVD.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne