Joan of Arc

“My goal is to temporalize the spiritual. To bring the icons down among us today,” notes French cineaste/provocateur Bruno Dumont of his mystical, austere, questioning revisitation of the Joan of Arc legend, inspired by the writings of French socialist poet Charles Péguy. In a work that is “equal parts Brecht, Bresson, and Busby Berkeley” (Jonathan Romney, Screen), Dumont strips away nearly all action and distraction to expose the transcendental, hallucinatory nature of the tale itself, of a young girl who hears the voice of God in the midst of battle and stands defiant in the face of rageful, doddering masculinity. French history retold by one of cinema’s great eccentrics, this Joan gives us a protagonist played by a cherubic ten-year-old (Lise Leplat Prudhomme) confronting a rogue’s gallery of unconventionally cast interrogators, military thugs, and religious zealots; her “visions” are imagined through hypnotically blissed-out electronic psalms provided by legendary French chanteur Christophe. Joan “draws attention to the malignancy of dogmas,” Dumont writes. “She stands before people who are always there to tell us who is ‘damned’ and who is ‘chosen.’”