Review of Joan the Maid 1: The Battles

I am a great admirer of the French cinema. That their film industry can consistently produce good quality material with very limited money speaks volumes for the professional artistry employed throughout the industry. Which brings us to 'Jeanne la Purcelle'. Joan of Arc has always been an emotive subject and one the French have found difficult to commit to celluloid. Although it was a dark historic episode from which France eventually emerged reinvigorated the story of Joan is essentially one of treachery and appeasement. A factual account might satisfy the purists but is not one that necessarily makes for good cinema. This is an 'epic' production, but only euphemistically, for size is not everything. Any production that stretches for three and a half hours, albeit over two films, has got to be offer the viewer something to compensate for what were only ever going to be symbolic battle scenes .... and it didn't!

It was wasn't just that the full scale assault was portrayed more like a small guerrilla skirmish it was the fight scenes themselves, the one-on-ones, which were poorly choreographed. The narrative was adequate but uninspiring - I guess Shaw is a hard act to emulate. The acting was merely efficient - Sandrine Bonnaire went on to do far more impressive work. The editing was poor with the camera being allowed to linger eternally on irrelevancies presumably to engender an 'atmosphere'. It failed. Overall the producers bit off far more than they could chew and were far too ambitious given the financial constraints imposed. A sobering lesson in how not to make a film.