Lise Leplat Prudhomme has undoubted charisma as the doomed heroine, but Bruno Dumont’s dead-straight biopic is passionless and exasperating
This movie about Joan of Arc is a stately, deadpan classical-absurdist pageant, adapted from Charles Péguy’s writings about her. With it, Bruno Dumont takes his own creative development as a film-maker further down an intriguing but increasingly perplexing avenue. Or maybe it is a cul-de-sac.
Dumont started with the shocking, visionary realism of movies such as The Life of Jesus (1997), Humanity (1999) and Outside Satan (2011). Then he moved boldly and very successfully into broad
comedy with his TV miniseries Li’l Quinquin (2014) and the period diversion Slack Bay (2016), amplifying the bat-squeak of humour that was probably there all along. In 2017, he made Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, a film with rock
music about the eight-year-old Joan. And now there is this, effectively a follow-up, with the self-possessed Lise Leplat Prudhomme reprising her lead role.