France, 1425. In the midst of the Hundred Years’ War, the young Jeannette, at the still tender age of 8, looks after her sheep in the small village of Domremy. One day, she tells her friend Hauviette how she cannot bear to see the suffering caused by the English. Madame Gervaise, a nun, tries to reason with the young girl, but Jeannette is ready to take up arms for the salvation of souls and the liberation of the Kingdom of France. Carried by her faith, she will become Joan of Arc. Imagine all of this sung and danced and you will probably get but a vague idea all the same of how daring Bruno Dumont’s latest feature really is. His electro-metal musical featuring wild head-banging performed by children, teenagers and twin nuns may very well be the most eccentric cinematic take on Joan of Arc’s story to date.
“With his tenth feature, Bruno Dumont radically delves into Joan's childhood with a category-defying period-cum-techno-head-banging musical, derived from two works by French writer Charles Péguy... Exquisitely shot in a palette of royal blues, heather greens, and sand by Guillaume Deffontaines, Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc oozes elemental beauty. With a touch of Straub-Huillet materialism, Dumont casts non-actors in the leading roles and makes use of live sync sound for the sung, a cappella dialogue, creating an intoxicating combination of naturalism, amateurism, and anarchic artifice that is bolstered by an electro-metal score from French multi-instrumentalist Igorrr and a majorettes-meets–mosh pit choreography with hair-wagging paroxysms. Heady, strange, genuinely funny, and completely out of time, Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc is one helluva contribution to the canon of ‘Joan films’ and further proof of Dumont's astonishing versatility and uncompromising vision.” (Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival)
“Pitched somewhere between Straub-Huillet and Headbangers Ball, Monty Python and Messiaen, Bruno Dumont’s new feature Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc marks an unexpected and near-perfect synthesis of the French iconoclast’s many disparate interests and obsessions… For all the criticism Dumont has endured for abandoning realism and forsaking characters for caricature, he’s responsible for some of the most exhilaratingly alive cinema in the world right now.” (Jordan Cronk, Cinema Scope)
“As in Straub-Huillet’s work,here is the bracing delight of cinema’s core pleasure: the camera conjuring fierce physicality, light changes, the sounds of a specific place, the encounter of another person’s presence—and that person’s inextricable role as a participant in making or unmaking the world around them… In its spare focus and unvarying location, Dumont's fabulous film stringently channels provincial desperation, nationalist shame, religious aspiration and spiritual yearning into a form nearly naked in its vulnerable faith and silliness.” (Daniel Kasman, The Notebook)
“The line between headbanging and praying is perhaps more pervious than one would think, and what emerges from Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc is something like a divine faith in the power of film to capture Joan of Arc’s gradual spiritual awakening.” (Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter)
