Tournees Francophone Film Festival: “Jeanette”:

Proving that he remains French cinema’s greatest and freest adven-
turer, writer-director Bruno Dumont created a faithful but strikingly
contemporary adaptation of turn-of-the-century poet Charles Péguy’s
two plays about the childhood of Joan of Arc, with music by death
metal composer Igorr and modern-day children recorded singing
live on the dunes of the Pas-de-Calais. The result is mystifying and
mystical, jaw-dropping and farcical, but never less than inspired: a film
in which an eight-year-old girl does justice to the verse of one of the
great French poets while twin nuns do a gestural dance surrounded
by a flock of oblivious sheep. The story starts with the deeply Christian
peasant girl Jeanette confronting religious doubt in the face of the
English invasion of France, then leaps five years ahead to reveal the
willful teenage Jeanne on the eve of her departure to help the dauphin
break the siege of Orleans. For all its gleeful wackiness, Jeanette is
a serious film about the idea of France, childhood, and religious faith,
located at the unlikely intersection of realism and absolute movie fan-
tasy. And in entrusting great works of literature to children, Dumont
gives us a potent reminder that the classics belong to everybody.

French with English subtitles