Jacques Rivette Envisions a More Human Joan of Arc

Much of this feat comes down to Bonnaire’s astonishing performance. Previous Joans tended toward either the passionate or the steely, fixing the girl into the role of the useful symbol. Cast to embody what Rivette called Joan’s “popular side,” Bonnaire emphasizes the Maid’s conviction, which is not the same thing as certainty. Rather than ecstatic shouts or principled declarations, she speaks slowly, thoughtfully considering her words in light of both strategy and belief. Her Joan is unique among modern depictions of religious figures, for she neither preaches nor doubts; her faith is a matter of plain reality, as much the substance of her life as the devastation of the English invasion or the omnipresent threat of sexual violence. She consults her holy voices, but she cannot speak for them. She charges bravely into battle, but her wounds produce real pain, and she experiences real and overwhelming panic at the thought of her own death. Her ascent to the stake is lonely, dispirited, and despairing, and even the presence of the cross does not give her much relief.

Joan the Maid understands that Jeanne la Pucelle was not born to be channeled, or martyred, or made use of by clerical and national myths. Yet without these stories, without Joan’s transformation into a symbol, how would we know her today? In The Trials, Rivette stages a coronation ritual in the cathedral at Reims, an extensive sequence composed of gestures and formulations, all lavishly invested with royal and religious symbolism. It is Joan who has brought this about, yet she is oddly sidelined throughout the proceedings, and her standing at the French court begins to decline. Even her holy advisors have become murkier, their directions no longer so clear. She has gone from an actor to a vessel to a nuisance. Was she only ever a useful tool?

Here Rivette inserts a note of doubt into the heart of Joan’s hagiography. While bidding farewell to her spiritual advisor, the friar convinces Joan to put her signature on a condemnation of the followers of Czech cleric Jan Hus, a dissident theologian who was burned alive in 1415. Hus was a victim of politically motivated theology, and his fate both reflects and anticipates Joan’s own, illustrating how easily even those of sure and serious faith can find themselves coopted to serve the petty interests of the material world. Kings and cardinals, politicians and demagogues—up to the present day all have made use of the girl who, as Joan’s mother declares at the very beginning, was tried “without the shadow of the law, condemned in a damned and criminal way, and cruelly died by fire.”

A weaker film would make a polemic of this point, and drive itself into the ground. To his great and lasting credit, Rivette understood that it was just one piece of this story. By calling his film Joan the Maid, he emphasized not only her humble beginnings, but her essential humanity, the great contradiction of being that transcends all reductive symbology. To stake his epic duration and sizable budget—the film was “such a wreck from the point of view of production costs,” Rivette reflected in 1999—on such an intimate claim was a genuine risk. That it did not draw in audiences or pay off financially is not much of a surprise. Yet it is so rare for a film to invest the past with the same instability and uncertainty that we associate with life in the present. As with the Maid behind the myth, Joan does not deserve to be forgotten.