Product: The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (Region 2) (1999)
Rating: 2.0
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In the opening scene a thirteen-year-old Joan of Arc witnesses English soldiers burning her village and raping and murdering her sister. This much is true: the real Joan of Arc's village was pillaged when she was thirteen. She never had a sister. The villagers took refuge in a nearby castle. Those invaders weren't English and were probably about thirty years younger than the actors chosen for the scene.Nearly all of the principal roles in this film are miscast. The historical Joan of Arc was seventeen years old and not very pretty. King Charles VII was twenty-six. Most of the leading soldiers were around the same age. Decades of war and disease had decimated the older generation.This film consistently begs the question of how its unstable heroine ever rose to power, depicts her as the bewildered observer of her own success, and portrays king Charles VII as the thoroughly unworthy object of her devotion. Don't look here for subtle characterizations. Factions line up from the moment they meet Joan of Arc and wait for the chance to act (which, given the story's repeated assertions about her insignificance, is pretty odd).Historically accurate details make their appearance in awkward and disruptive ways. Older biopics about Joan of Arc generally had sanitized violence and bloodless battles. This film is gruesome in all the wrong ways. It is also true that some fifteenth-century hedonists liked to eat dinner in a bathtub built for two. No record suggests Charles VII ever did this - he was actually known for his piety - and the film's decision to plop him into one seems based on the assumption that John Malkovich needs props to be sufficiently creepy.The Messenger isn't exactly an anti-historical film. Many of its story and character elements have respectable pedigrees. Some twentieth-century scholars treat Joan of Arc as more of a psychological case study than a political or military leader. I doubt it was the filmmakers' intention to discredit these theories by dramatizing how unsatisfactory they are as narrative, but in this respect at least The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc succeeds.