Good supporting actors, but a bit tedious

Rating: Null/10 (20 February 2000)

I watched the Video Images 1985 video cassette version. Image quality was slightly grainy. Cropping did not appear to be off. This should give an idea of the technical quality of the release I watched.
I have mixed emotions about this film. On the one hand the facial close ups were pretty, but they got tedious for me, and I do feel that I have a lot of patience with movies.
I feel that this movie could have benefitted a great deal from sound. Mainly because in a court room interrogation sound would be useful. Given that the actors in the film would also have made as good voice actors as they are actors, this could have been very captivating. As it is I found the most interesting scene to be the torture wheel. The slower film speed makes it appear abstracted and dreamlike. The interrogations still have their intense bits, and I feel that the supporting actors contributed very well to the feel of the movie.
The main long term artistic merit of the film is the artistic cropping of the close ups of Joan. The same close ups and cropping were used on Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3. There is even a head shaving scene in both movies. Alien 3 seems to be praised mainly for mood and cinematography by other imdb reviewers. It borrows these from Joan of Arc. This shows that these devices are still relevant today, which means that Passions of Joan of Arc has framing and set up that are considered good by a general audience today. This also shows that facial close ups of a woman with a shaved head just do not necessarily make a good movie without substance to back the film up.
What back up there is in Joan is excellent. The story is based on reality which gives it distinctive twists, so plotwise the film is stable. The actors who make up the court trying Joan are excellent. They make the film worth watching.
My final recommendation is to skip this, unless you like artsy close ups, or have some special reason for viewing it. It was slow for me at bits, and I doubt that you be captivated by the whole film. The excellent acting keeps the movie from being to tedious, but it didnÕt pull me in. This may be due to grainy image quality on the edition I watched, and not due to the film.