Directed by Luc Besson
Gaumont Pictures/Columbia Tristar, on general release in north America

"When I was thirteen years old, I had a voice from God to help me govern my conduct... The first time I was very fearful. And came this voice, about the hour of noon, in the summer­time, in my father's garden... I heard the voice on the right­hand side, towards the church; and rarely do I hear it without a brightness. This brightness comes from the same side as the voice is heard. It is usually a great light. . . .This voice was sent to me by God and, after I had thrice heard this voice, I knew that it was the voice of an angel. This voice has always guided me well and I have always understood it clearly."

 

Joan of Arc, inspired or insane?

This is the description of her voices provided by Joan of Arc at her trial for heresy (from R Pernoud's book Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses, translated by E Hyams and M D Lanham). In other passages she describes the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret and the archangel Michael, speaking to her in the second person. She is some­ times guarded about their content, but much of what she volunteers relates to her mission to crown a king of France. In 1431, at the age of 19, she would be burned as a heretic, but in 1456 she was "rehabilitated" by a posthumous retrial. Eventually, she would be beatified as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church (in 1894). We know more about her life than about most other medieval figures because of the sworn statements acquired at these two trials. Historians are agreed on the basic facts, but the story of Joan has acquired accretions of interpretation, reinvigorated by novels, films, plays, politics, and polemic. She had a brief successful military career, but she was captured, betrayed, and ultimately condemned at the political show trial of its day, a theme explored in G B Shaw's play Saint Joan.

Now comes this new offering from the French director Luc Besson, the maker of action films such as Nikita and The Fifth Element. What he brings to the story of Joan is the full impact of Hollywood bombast-a Joan for the MTV generation. And this he does very well. He convincingly conveys the sheer brutality of medieval conflict and the social milieu that nurtured the belief in the coming of a virgin to "save France." Although he alters the phenomenology of Joan's experiences considerably (and risks parody by borrowing too heavily from The Omen, the legend of King Arthur, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood), he manages to convey the central dilemma confronting those who consider the details seriously: how could these events have occurred? Was Joan inspired or insane?

Besson resorts to all that is admissible in our secular age: the contrast between the unusual child, out of keeping with her peers, seemingly too religious too young (with a hint of ecstatic epilepsy), and a pathography that emerges in the context of trauma, giving rise to two interpretations of her motivation - idiosyncrasy or pure revenge. Here, I think, he does Joan a disservice, for he invents a pivotal trauma and denies her the meanings that she herself would have understood. He also denies her a subtlety that she clearly evinced throughout her trial. An illiterate girl, she was imprisoned for a year and repeatedly cross examined by multiple interrogators, at times 30 to 40 in the room. Yet, even under these conditions the records show that she was clear in her reasoning and cognisant of ambiguity. She noted that the voices had told her that her suffering would end soon, though she did not know if they meant an end to prison or to life itself.

Sean A Spence De Witt­Wallace visiting research fellow in psychiatry, New York Hospital­Cornell Medical Center, New York, USA