Product: The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (Region 2) (1999)
Rating: 4.0
The Medium is the Messenger
Divine Message or Hysterical Delusion?It is 1425, and France is a corpse-strewn battlefield. Since 1337 the land has been ravaged by the Hundred Years War between the English, the French, and fickle barons and dukes willing to shift their loyalties for gold, titles, and land in Perfidious Albion, north of the icy Channel. English soldiers, brigands, and madmen roam the countryside, burning, looting and pillaging everything in their path.It is a time of frenzy; it is a time of ecstatic vision.It is a time in which the messianic Joan la Pucelle, later known to history and fate as Joan of Arc (played in wide-eyed wonder by the gorgeous Milla Jovovich), emerged, born into an ensanguined world and bearing the word of God Himself on her lips to the future King of France, the hapless Dauphin Charles.It is this fiery, faith-driven, brink-of-madness world which Luc Besson attempts to conjure up in the uneven "The Messenger", which shares a little of the fevered madness of its wild-eyed heroine.What is the true nature of the Divine? How does He talk to His servants? How do you know the voice of God is really the voice of God---and not something else, something malignant, the voice of a demon or possibly madness? To his credit, Besson plunges deep into this dilemma, and the opening sequences in which Joan's young visions come heralded by unearthly winds and a vision of a glowering, leering (and ultimately aging, decrepit, and senescent) Christ are unsettling and horrible, suggesting that the source of her zeal may not be divine in nature.Besson has always had a flair for visual artistry, and "The Messenger" is no exception. The imagery, assisted by veteran cinematographer Thierry Arboghast (who worked with Besson on "The 5th Element" and also served as Director of Photography for the lush "Ridicule), is rich, striking, captures the feel of the 15th century battlefield, and throws the viewer into battlefields and siege trenches fertilized with gore and muddy pastures turned into rancid abattoirs with the blood of the dead.The battle sequences are handsomely mounted, vivid, compelling, and brutal, particularly the Siege of Orleans. A sequence introduced by a shot from a trebuchet (a piece of medieval siege artillery) is at once remarkably faithful and dramatically awe-inspiring.Fashion model Milla Jovovich does a fine job with a challenging role, and makes "The Messenger" her movie; her expressive face says more with a glance or a turn of the mouth than lesser actresses could with 100 pages of dialogue.John Malkovich is at his purring, brooding best as the Dauphin; Faye Dunaway brings history to life as the devious Yolande D'Aragon; Tcheky Karyo provides the heavy weapons support and uniformly stolid jawline as the phlegmatic, doubting, faithful Dunois; Vincent Cassel seems to be having the time of his life as the laughing Gilles de Rais; and Dustin Hoffman has a shadowy, skulking, gloriously contemporary little part in tempting, tormenting, and confusing Joan.For all of its pageantry and scope, this is a decidedly intimate little film that has far more to say about the nature of Faith and Things Larger than Oneself than it does, necessarily, about the historically enigmatic and ambiguous St. Joan.This ultimately makes Besson's sins (all those of excess, the very best kind) forgivable, because this final inquisition between Joan and her hooded tormentor makes the film so much more accessible to all us, beset as we are by our fears and doubts.The final question, once all the fire and blood and plunder and ruin of "The Messenger" succumb to night and silence, is this: do we hear the voice of God because we finally allow ourselves to listen---or because we so desperately want to hear?JSG