Copyright New Republic Nov 29, 1999THE DARDENNE BROTHERS, Luc and Jean-Pierre, are the Belgian filmmakers who, in 1996, gave us La Promesse, a fine and unforgettable work.
It burrowed into a chunk of rough proletarian life in Li&ge today, an environment in which the struggle to survive leads, ravenously, to the exploitation of workers by workers. Into this pit of vipers came an African family that showed a teenage Belgian boy-simply through their pride-- that another kind of existence is possible, even in the muck. Now in Rosetta (October) the Dardennes bring us another teenager, this time a girl, in another grim Belgian environment.
La Promesse began in cool slyness, as the boy stole the pension money of an elderly woman. Rosetta explodes on to the screen with anger, Rosetta's anger as she storms down the hall of an office building. She has just been fired from a job in that building, and she assails the boss because of his injustice. No use: she has to leave. And she takes her anger with her.
Anger is the ostinato of the film. Even when Rosetta is quieter, she is angry. She lives in a trailer camp with her mother who, most of the time, is either drunk or sleeping with some man or both; and Rosetta has to fend for her mother and herself. She doesn't complain about the conditions of her life: she accepts them, even the hopelessness of her mother. But she is not supine; she is fierce. Her life has turned her into a jackal, nipping at chances to exist. When she gets a job, which she does by reporting the thievery of a boy in that job, she fills it well enough; but the wounds and scars of her struggle, her simmering fierceness, make it unlikely that she will ever settle into conventional order. As we see.
The Dardennes, who write their own screenplays, heat their picture with Rosetta's fury. I can't remember another film that was shot so predominantly with a hand-held camera. It's as if the girl's anger affected the very way in which her story is told. And the performance of Emilie Dequenne is so thoroughly immersed in this anger that, naively, we have to wonder what Dequenne herself was like between takes. Of course, this could be a question about any actor plunged into an extreme role, but Dequenne is so young and her performance is so relentless, so free of the self-regard that can tinge even good actors, that the question slips in.
No chance is skipped to articulate the squalor of Rosetta@s life. (When she is out of money for food, she fishes in a pond near the trailer camp; when people fall into the pond, we learn how muddy it is, thus what the fish must be like.) The ceaseless fight for survival is in fact the firmest note in the picture. Since Rosetta never stops hating and fighting, no matter what happens, her struggle becomes a harsh tribute to inner strength.
But this relatively unvaried tone takes its toll on the film. In La Promesse the spiritual degradation was much the same, even though the boy and his father were comparatively prosperous, but the film moved to some wisp of hope for the boy. Rosetta is trapped, trapped throughout. A closing dash of Technicolor uplift would have been an atrocity. (The change in La Promesse was organic, true.) But the lack of even a catastrophe at the end of Rosetta, let alone uplift, turns the film into a dossier, the chronicle of a case. Once again the Dardennes are, quite obviously, greatly moved by the people with whom they deal, and they present the girl with insistent candor. But this time they have treated their subject as if they were making a documentary; and since it is fiction, their film leaves us with a sense of incompleteness, which La Promesse certainly did not. One wry truth about art is that it needs a little arrangement in order to seem unarranged.
The life of Joan of Are is a snare for playwrights and film-makers. Dozens have been drawn to it, understandably enough, but to my knowledge, only one playwright (Shaw) and only one film-maker (Dreyer) have been able to treat it adequately. (I'm not considering the Verdi and Tchaikovsky operas, both of whose librettos derive from Schiller's play about the maid, or even Paul Claudel's poem for Arthur Honegger's dramatic oratorio. Music complicates the matter.) "Adequate" is hardly adequate for Shaw and Dreyer; both created great art. It would seem that, if you can treat Joan adequately, a masterwork is inevitable.
A playwright has one great advantage over a filmmaker: the theater is not tied to one actress. I have seen five women play Shaw's Joan, none of whom was good enough, yet the play survives, exalting us in print as it waits for still more women to attempt it. The filmmaker has to choose the right actress the first and only chance he will get. In ironical fact, Falconetti was better as Dreyer's Joan than any of those whom I have seen attempt Shaw's Joan: but then the Joans created by these two men are quite different. Shaw's is more filly chronicled, while Dreyer concentrates on the martyrdom. (He called his film, exactly, The Passion of Joan Arc.)
The Messenger. The Story of Joan of Arc (Columbia) essays the Shaw approach, the full story, but with the filmmaker's obligation: to cast the role properly the first and only chance he would get. The director, Luc Besson, best known for La Femme Nikita, has flunked this test drastically. Thus, no matter what other virtues the film has-and it has a few-it is doomed very early. Milla Jovovich, who plays Joan, is a young woman who has been unmemorable in several pictures. We are also told that, as a model, she has been on more than fifteen magazine covers. That is the sum of her previous career.
Sometimes I am forced to wonder about the very sanity of film people. Here, to put it just in production terms, is a major enterprise that involved a huge amount of money. Here, in larger terms, is a role in which an actress must convince us that, at seventeen, her Joan could persuade the Dauphin to give her command ofhis army, who could lead those soldiers to victory over the English, who was so triumphant that the English conspired to buy her from her Burgundian captors, and who, through all her actions, was burning with the religious conviction that carried her to the stake. (And eventually to sainthood.) And for this role Besson chose someone whose major distinction was fifteen magazine covers.
Jovovich is pretty enough-anyway, there is no need for Joan to be beautiful-- but it is an undistinguished face. Her voice is thin, her emotional power thin, her ability to convince us of spiritual fire very much thinner. Her exhortations about her mission from God make us look around for the high school auditorium and the rest of the senior-class production in which she is starring. Jean Seberg, who had some small-scale talent, was painfully out of place in Preminger's film of Shaw's play, but Jovovich makes Seberg look sterling.
Besson wrote this serpentine screenplay with Andrew Birkin, and the influence of Shaw is not always hidden. (After his coronation, for instance, the new king says of Joan: "If only she would go home. "At the end of the cognate scene in Shaw, the king says: "If only she would keep quiet, or go home") At least Besson has cast some of the supporting roles decently. John Malkovich as the Dauphin, Faye Dunaway as his mother-in-law, Tcheky Karyo as Dunois, the commander who befriends Joan, and Timothy West as the bishop who presides at Joan's trial-all of them belong in a better picture. Dustin Hoffman plays the embodiment of Joan's conscience, who has conversations with her in her cell during the trial. Hoffman, always intelligent, manages to keep the role-or non-role-- this side of the risible.
My Research
