Dustin Chang : It does
make sense that you would tackle Joan of arc story since you have made films
about pure faith before. But I never would’ve thought it would be a musical
comedy. Did you conceive the film as musical to begin with?
Bruno Dumont :
Yes of course. I would never have conceived doing Péguy without music
because Péguy without music is inconceivable. I like musical comedies very
much. I was looking for a subject that needed that balance, that needed the
music. I was looking for a text that would be pertinent to use music.
Some texts don’t need
music because they are very clear as they are. Péguy is a complicated, complex
writer and my hope was that music would give access to him. That we don’t have
to give up on Péguy because he is too hard to get into. It’s like we don’t
throw away a rose because it has thorns- the idea is to keep the thorns but
somehow pacify things with music.
So in most musical
plays, they mostly turn to poets to complete their work so there is nice
relationship, one could even call it, a friendship between poetry and music. A
companionship.
DC : There is a repetitive rhythmic quality
almost like Philip Glass in the text when they sing.
BD : Absolutely you are right.
DC : Why portray the
childhood of Joan?
BD : Once I had the
music and the rhythm, I needed the subject. Joan of Arc is major French myth.
But the fact is the subject is secondary, since we have the music. So the
subject should be not too complicated. Joan of Arc is very well known. I needed
to combine that with this new kind of experience in cinema. It happens that her
childhood is not very well known that Péguy brings us luckily for us. So we
have a known element Joan of Arc and not too well known – her childhood. So
combining all these things together, I wanted to make something interesting.
It’s more like a composer looking for a book for his next opera. But for me the
subject herself was not that important.
DC : One could not think
of Joan of Arc story without the close ups of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in
Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Is there any correlation between your
Jeannette and Dreyer’s Jeanne?
BD : Not immediately.
The fact that I was dealing with the childhood, it created sharp break. So I
didn’t have to deal with this major figure of Dreyer, who is always lurking
around. The fact I am dealing with the nine year-old, means that I am, perhaps
naively, cutting that influence.
DC : Tell me about the
work you’ve done for this movie with the choreographer Philippe Decouflé.
BD: Dance is a way of
expressing Péguy’s mysticism- it’s the way of embodying it. So for example, the
little girl would say to me, “I don’t
understand this part.” Then, I would say, “ Well, then dance.” Dance
becomes another way of expressing the inexpressible. There are a lot we don’t
understand in Péguy's texts. What we have in there is the rhythm, and that’s
where the correspondence is.
Like the headbanging.
There is not explanation for that. It’s a form of expressing grace. In a Heavy
Metal concert, there is that absolute grace in that energy. So when we came to
the part we didn’t understand, we’d go, “Girls, go ahead. Headbang!”
What we are looking for
is harmony. It’s the dance, the shots, in the editing… it’s the effigy of
harmony, whether it’s in the words, in the movements. It’s the formal thing
that is an absolute quest and the meaning doesn’t matter. We are looking for
beauty, we are looking for the shots to be happy between themselves.
DC : So it doesn’t
really matter to you whether they are real singers or not. Or they sing well.
BD : They shouldn’t be
real singers. It mustn’t be sung well. There is something inhuman, something false
about perfection. We need the flaws in the little girl. You know she has to go
down so she can go up. She has to sing badly, so that when she sings well, it’s
something special. It’s not interesting to hear someone sing well all the time.
It’s like listening to
the record and listening to the concert. It’s powerful to hear a singer in
concert because you hear the flaws in their voices. It has to be a live
spectacle, live sound. Records in perfect dolby sound, I don’t listen to them
anymore. It’s boring. My cinema is live.
DC : How did you cast
the young actresses? What quality were you looking for?
BD : I was looking for
the heart of Joan of arc. The part was an effigy of all little girls. I was
looking for the process from sowing to blossoming of all the hearts of little
girls. It’s an extraordinary thing. If you put a little girl in Péguy’s texts,
you just watch her grow. You water her a little bit and she blossoms.
She is intelligent,
gracious and peculiar – she was herself. She had her own ways and when you put
some Péguy, then you really hear Joan of arc.
It’s the contrary to
idealization. It’s not believing in the idea of Joan of Arc but making a
regular little girl and it’s the regularity that will take us to the thing I am
looking for.
DC : So you didn’t have
to convince them about what Joan of Arc has decide to do? That she wanted to save the damned? that she
wanted to be more savoir than jesus?
BD : Yes. She did learn
the texts. She had questions and we accompanied her. But the real questions
were them as a musical interpreter- how they are going to sing. She was more
interested in how to sing than what the text means.
DC : Nicolas Leclaire,
who plays Jeannette’s uncle, how did you find him? He is hilarious.
One of the main criteria
for our casting was looking for someone who could sing, obviously. So I met
this young man who’s a rapper. The music composer didn’t want him. He said,
“What do I do with him? He’s a rapper.”
We took in what’s
beautiful and marvelous about him. He was a bit off. But we accepted that and
took that quality in him in. He was touching and also funny which is rare. He
is never ridiculous. He has his own poetry and musicality. He couldn’t sing and
only rapped. But we took that in and he was extraordinary. There was something
very audacious about us taking Nicolas in, who didn’t fit at all in what we
were trying to do. He had his own dance practices and our choreographer found a
way to integrate him.
He was a counterweight
to Peguy’s over seriousness and that’s where we found the balance.
DC : Speaking of
overseriousness, I am a big fan of your serious dramas. I haven’t gotten
accustomed to your comedies yet. (Dumont laughs)
DC : I think I
understand what you are doing with these comedic films since P’tit Quinquin,
that these are just a flipside of a coin to your more austere dramas it’s any
serious dramas are always on the verge of becoming comedies. Would you plan to
do more comedies or are you going back to serious dramas?
DC : I find balance in
tragicomedies but not in outright comedies. I needed to go off from tragedy. I
wanted to find balance. And I find it in tragicomedy. It’s like the presence of
the uncle in Jeannette. Because Jeannette is too heavy. It becomes too
pontificating. It’s just like what you find in the paintings of Bosch and
Brueghel – you have these grotesque images but inside them there are humorous
bits.
I think you can really
express deep thoughts and feelings in comedies. You can go really profound in
ways you can’t do in dramas. Funny is deep, rich and surprising. What counts is
to surprise the viewer.
Screenanarchy, April 11,
2018.
The Film Stage: In my research, I come across your great admiration for Péguy. You speak of him in very laudatory terms, the essential part his writing played here; but I think of Bruno Dumont as a very singular figure. So is there a sense of giving yourself over fully to an artist, or more than you’re used to?
Bruno Dumont: With
Péguy, really, there’s a discovery that goes beyond the artist and poet. What
really moves me most is the philosopher Péguy. It’s an extremely contemporary
thought of the human condition, and there’s no correspondence among
philosophers today. I really see his thought as a thought of the present, the
instant, and grace which has no lineage in western philosophy, so he’s
completely in the metaphysics of Bergson, but he’s also embodying philosophy in
art – or art is the embodiment of philosophy. Bergson remains a philosopher,
whereas Péguy takes this additional step – he’s the artist as philosopher, and
he really describes, defines, cinema. Cinema is the overwhelming,
lightning-like expression of the present through a heroic figure, and Joan of
Arc is a heroic figure. The fact is, you can have the experience of God in
cinema and in the location of the simulacram of cinema.
The Film Stage : Do you share these ideas with
your performers?
BD : So, if I talk to the little one about all
this stuff, she’s not going to understand anything. Once the director has the
understanding, then the actor has the action. The actor is only in action. It’s
an error to talk to the actor about thought. The actor is an interpreter. He’s
not there to meditate; he’s only there to act, as in “do things.” Otherwise, it
would be unbearable.
TFS : You said the young
Joan, in auditions, was wild and impulsive. How do you know that will be good
for a production?
BD : In fact, I filmed
the casting. I make my choices based on seeing the rushes of the casting;
that’s when I say “yes.” It’s not the interview with the actor; that’s quite
banal. “Cinegeny,” or whether someone reads well on film, is something that I
see, and something that some people have and other people don’t. I don’t know
why that is, but that’s what I see when I look at the rushes.
TFS : You described her
recitation of the material as obscure. What are the specific pleasures of
obscurity in performance?
BD : What’s obscure is
the meaning; what is not obscure is the rhythm. The little girl understands the
rhythm of Péguy’s text; she doesn’t understand the meaning. Myself, there are
passages that I do not understand at all. Péguy’s poetry is rhythm. The meaning
is not important. It’s a theologically obscure text, and what’s important is
something that’s tonal, musical. There’s a kind of knowledge there that takes
us towards a mystical, ecstatic level. It’s like when you listen to music
there. There’s no meaning there; there’s something there that has nothing to do
with thought, that has just purely to do with the domain of music. And I just
want to correct something that I said earlier, for your tape: I said he’s
tonal, music etc. It’s not that there’s a knowledge; there’s no knowledge,
whereas there’s something mystical and ecstatic.
TFS : I’d like to know
about the key differences between shootings on sets and locations.
BD : The huge advantage
of shooting on location is that everything is there. It’s like the sheep: I
don’t order up the sheep. I like these accidents, this happenstance. It’s like
the sound of the trees, the birds, the wind. All these things are happenstance,
and they’re very important. Because cinema is such an artificial form: you have
to set up your camera, you have to set up your frame, you have to go in search
of the happenstance; you have to go in search of the breath. The countryside
has this breath, this spirit to it.
And I accept the
happenstance; I need it. It gives the film texture, and that’s why I use direct
sound: I take what happens, whatever comes. In those circumstances, what wasn’t
planned for is part of what was planned for. I can always cut, after all. I
have this little girl’s breath, I have her heartbeat, and these take me back to
something that is non-thought, and is a kind of counter-balance to the artificiality.
As I was saying earlier, there’s an equilibrium that needs to be found. If we
did all these things inside a room, it would very quickly become unbearable.
That is Bergson. That idea is Bergson.
TFS : It was recently
announced that you’ll be doing a sequel to the film, titled Jeanne. This
follows your upcoming sequel to Li’l Quinquin. Your movies often feel
closed-off, singular, so what is your particular attraction to continuing
narratives?
BD : I find the subjects
so unimportant. It’s like in painting: you can make something grand, major,
with just a little crossroads in the countryside. The subject is so
unimportant. I was very interested in a series, to come back to something. So,
in Quinquin, I come back to my characters four years later. So there’s the same
actors, the same characters, then something else. That’s exactly what I think
of cinema: it’s always the same director making another film, so there’s always
some same and some other. I’m always making The Life of Jesus, actually. But my
style has evolved, my sensibility has evolved, so now, when I see The Life of
Jesus, I want to recut it. We continue making films because we evolve. There’s no
reason to say “I’m going to stop” because we’re constantly evolving.
TFS : You’ll be making a
film based on the period that we do know. What material, in particular, do you
look at when going there? Are you particularly conscious of the many great
filmmakers who have explored it?
BD : The second part is
the battles. What I’m interested in is finding a way of renewing the battles, a
new approach to the battles. We’ve seen lots of films that deal with the
battles – most of them start there and then go to the trail – so what I’m
looking for is renewing it, a new way of showing this part with a contemporary
sensibility and make Joan of Arc felt today. I think I’ve found a new way to
show these battles. I’m not going to shoot like Cecil B. DeMille, that’s for
sure – but I do like Cecil B. DeMille.
TFS : Do you have a
favorite of them?
BD : [Laughs] I really
like Cecil B. DeMille. His Joan of Arc looks like she’s 40. That makes it very
original, actually.
Bruno Dumont on the Rhythm of
‘Jeannette,’ Evolution of Style, and the Actor’s Interpretation, The Film Stage , April 12, 2018
Since canonization in 1920, Joan,
one of France’s patron saints, has been played by some of film’s greatest icons
(Maria Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman) as well as trendy Hollywood starlets (Milla
Jovovich, Leelee Sobieski), but in each iteration it’s the spectacle of her
martyrdom that dominates the story, not the humble nature of her origins.
Dumont delights in the reverse approach. Jeannette is a gloriously shameless
instance of art house eccentricity. Sans celebs, excessive scenery, or striking
dancing talent, the film reads like a Judson School rejoinder to the Christian
rock opera, a picturesque fable flying in the face of the sublime.
The film is also, in many ways, a trial of viewers’ attention spans. Once 16-year-old Jeanne (played by Jeanne Voisin) works up the nerve to flee her sheep, her friends, and laconic domus, one expects an intense adieu. Instead, Dumont cuts to an outdoor shot “before the end of the following winter,” with Jeanne calmly spinning wool and still waiting for time to head to the front. “We can leave in peace,” she tells her uncle (Gery De Poorter), a bumbling lad who seems more like a brother. “Like eight months ago?” he gibes. “This time for good,” she explains, her eyes never straying from her menial task.
Is Jeanne truly led by visions, or is she a bored-out-of-her-mind wunderkind trapped in the middle of nowhere? An exercise in patience, Jeannette suggests that it doesn’t matter. “If the soldiers refuse, I’ll gather the people,” she resolves, her horse chewing oats nearby. “And if they refuse, I’ll go alone.” Her decision segues into one last fevered dance, this time less loony than tragic. Denying us any whiff of the violence to come, Dumont celebrates the innocence — and banality — of a young saint’s life. We know what comes next for this girl, after all, and we ask if it is worth it.
Visions of Joan of Arc as a Dancing,
Singing, Head-Banging Kid. Hyperallergic
, April 13, 2018
What Jeanette captures
more than any other film I can think of is the strangeness of Christian faith
even to its adherents. Any intimacy we experience with God is unpredictable.
For the film’s Joan as for so many believers—even those whose earliest
education was formed by faith—God breaks in from the outside. Jarring
contrasts, like complex theology issuing from the mouth of a little child, have
become almost predictable in art films. But by using these contrasts to depict
genuine religious visions, Dumont both revitalizes art-film conventions and
portrays, more than any other hagiographical film I know, the weirdness of the
saints. (Dumont has praised Alain Cavalier, whose 1986 Thérèse is another
unsettled, beautiful film that captures the strange currents of a girl-saint’s
mind—though Cavalier worked in a much less aggressive mode.)
Dumont’s film begins in
what seems like an idyll: A nine-year-old girl is singing her prayers as she
watches her sheep by the side of a winding river. But the prayers are not
idyllic. Jeanette (Lise Leplatte Prudhomme) breaks off before she finishes, and
begins to change her entreaties into challenges: “Your Name is so far from
being hallowed and Your reign from coming,” she laments to God. Under a huge
sky, in an expanse of pastoral beauty (this is a gorgeous film that didn’t
spend its money on set dressing), Jeanette cries out her frustrations at France’s
political divisions—and at the silent God who does not help. She sings
fiercely, apocalyptically, “And there is nothing; there is never anything.”
She is so small. Sheep
baa in a kind of farmland rimshot punctuating her prayers. She turns cartwheels,
because she hasn’t learned to hold her body with adult reserve. She has intense
theological arguments with her best friend, another little girl named Hauviette
(Lucile Gauthier), both actresses speaking the complex lines with bizarrely
credible conviction.
Eventually a nun
appears, Madame Gervaise, to guide Jeanette. This sister is played by twin
sisters (Aline and Elise Charles). Like all the film’s strange choices, it
isn’t pointlessly edgy. When the nun speaks in chorus she is no longer an
individual giving an opinion, but the voice of religious community; she is a
community within herself, like the Trinity. She’s definitely weird, and there
are hints here of the confrontational imagery of a horror movie—she appears out
of nowhere, inexplicably doubled, a real person whom Jeanette’s friends know
and yet also a vision. She chastises Jeanette (“You must suffer if you [want
to] call God to account”). The two of them have a theological song battle, with
a rock guitar backing, which rises to a high pitch of ecstasy when they
suddenly begin head-banging—and the nun’s wimple falls as her hair, a woman’s
glory, the sign that she and Jeanette are alone before God, streams down and
whips across her face. It’s a stunning moment, feminine and aggressive all at once,
joyous and strange. The mentor becomes young again, and the girl becomes a
warrior working herself up before battle.
The visual vocabulary of
Jeanette is simple: sky, sheep, river. Late scenes in Jeanette’s father’s hut
are the film’s one concession to the idea that audiences might like the
occasional change of scenery. The musical vocabulary is not so simple. The
combination of unaccompanied singing and thrashing guitars suggests that Joan’s
story links our time and her own. The music does not respect the barrier of
time; it is as if the audience, like God—and like the saints, interceding in
our lives from their vantage point in Heaven—can see and hear from the
perspective of infinity. The distance between past and present dissolves in the
ecstasy of experiencing the great “I AM.”
The film’s vocabulary of
movement is similarly meaningful in its awkward strangeness. These actors
delight in their bodies. The children’s bodies twist and stretch and turn
upside-down, which is both realistic and perfectly in line with the movie’s
portrayal of a world awry and overturned.
Jeanette’s explicit
theological concerns include questions about whether one should wish to be
damned to rescue others, whether she is called to suffer for the damned, and
whether the existence of damned souls should cause her own soul to rebel. These
questions, which bring sharp rebukes from Madame Gervaise that Jeanette does
her best to accept, are unrelated to the mission the audience knows she will
eventually receive. There is a long, incantatory passage about how we don’t
know our own happiness—in the midst of our misery we have our happiness in
Christ, even if we don’t believe—which, if anything, might suggest that there
is no need for a dangerous military mission. Obviously a movie about Saint Joan
will depict Christian faith, but Jeanette suggests that its heroine did not
understand her own task in the same terms that we would.
Once Jeanette receives
her mission, the film screeches to a halt, then meanders around for a while.
Jeanette, now played by Jeanne Voisin, tries to find the Dauphin (which we
don’t see, because Dauphins are far outside this film’s budget). She fails; she
mopes. She ponders the morality of lying, and makes some startlingly bad
justifications for it, which the film lets stand. There’s chicken-plucking and
artsy dancing which can only be described as “Europeasant,” and the thrills of
the movie’s early sections begin to fade.
Presumably it’s easier
to give urgency to scenes of ecstatic religious vision than to scenes of
everyday confusions and obstacles. Perhaps Dumont intends to depict Jeanette
adrift, unguided now that her visionary companions have left her, trying to
work out what they might want but struggling to make her own limited resources
match her task. She becomes complicit in the usual human self-justifications
(man is the rationalizing animal) and struggles to find the path forward. But
the danger of form-follows-function is always that the audience will be as
confused as the characters. It must be possible to depict frustration without
being frustrating. In this final section, both the thinking and the filmmaking
seem to slacken.
The final scene
recaptures some of the early grandeur. It’s a surprisingly normal and intimate
portrayal of the girl riding away from her home. It’s as if we are leaving
behind the transforming, surreal inner experience of the childhood visionary,
and entering the part of Joan’s life which can be communicated through dates
and maps. She rides out of childhood, into adulthood; out of apocalypse, and
into history.
Unless Ye Become as
Little Children, The American Interest ,
June 29, 2018.
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