Here's what I saw: a confused teenager (it may be misleading to call a nineteen-year-old woman a teenager, and who knows what being nineteen meant in the Middle Ages) trying hard to cut a fine figure, and succeeding better than most - which is to say, not very well. Bresson lets us know she IS inspired, she DOES court supernatural influence, probably God's, but somehow this doesn't change anything. It's clear Joan is as clueless as everyone else of her era. Sweet, but clueless.
This film is only just over an hour long, and although the trial meanders - no-one really knows what he or she is doing - there's no sense of padding. It's a swift, clean, beautiful fable. I'm not sure it has a point: if it does, it lies in the short sharp shock we get at the end. All that legalistic fuffing around and then something decisive and fantastic happens. Very few films can suddenly introduce fantasy at the end and get away with it: this is one; "A Canterbury Tale" (1944) is another. Although Bresson's film is less ambitious, and succeeds partly because it gives itself little opportunity to set a foot wrong, it's still quite a feat.
This film is only just over an hour long, and although the trial meanders - no-one really knows what he or she is doing - there's no sense of padding. It's a swift, clean, beautiful fable. I'm not sure it has a point: if it does, it lies in the short sharp shock we get at the end. All that legalistic fuffing around and then something decisive and fantastic happens. Very few films can suddenly introduce fantasy at the end and get away with it: this is one; "A Canterbury Tale" (1944) is another. Although Bresson's film is less ambitious, and succeeds partly because it gives itself little opportunity to set a foot wrong, it's still quite a feat.