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Critics reviews

JOAN THE MAID, PART 2: THE PRISONS

Jacques Rivette France, 1994
Trying to describe the profound effect of all this is akin to concretely clarifying the potency and the impact of Henry James' prose. It can't be done; you just know when you're in it and when you're with it.
August 1, 2019
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Joan’s sudden bursts of laughter, like the two sharply contrasting hemispheres of Sheryl Lee’s performance [in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me], both extremes of placidity and frailty, are always startlingly vivacious, even though Rivette reminds us time and again of her inexperience and proximity to an illiterate childhood.
December 13, 2016
Cannon smoke turns the screen white for half a minute at the battle for the Fort des Tourelles, a brutal second of silence descends as an arrow sails into Joan's shoulder. (A sublime corporeality informs Bonnaire’s portrayal -- she cries with pain as pieces of armor are removed around the wound.)
January 2, 2010
The picture is a remarkable immersion into particular scenes of Joan's life. . . . It seems as if it's all down to the thoroughly remarkable Bonnaire, who is one of the few actors working today who can actually make the viewer see thought. . . . Hence, every minute spent with her Joan—who confesses, defies, maintains perfect integrity throughout—only maximizes the film's concentration.
October 13, 2009
It's ultimately less than scintillating, but is still of significant interest as Rivette’s response to the Dreyer-Bresson school of filmmaking. Rivette’s interest is in this world, not the next, and even when faced with a narrative of such significant spiritual quality as Joan of Arc’s (his film seems to say), his story remains firmly rooted in the poetics of our mortal lives.
January 24, 2003
Unlike Dreyer's Joan, who remained steadfast amid harsh religious persecution, Bonnaire's clarity of purpose survives private moments of uncertainty once her fortunes turn for the worst. Though not without its flaws . . . Joan The Maid is distinguished by its star's flesh-and-blood humanity. Rivette believes in Saint Joan, but he leaves her canonization to the church.
April 19, 2002
Paradoxically yet appropriately, Rivette's only “superproduction” to date . . . is his first realistic film since L'amour fou (1968)—and perhaps the only movie that offers a plausible portrait of what the 15th-century teenager who led the French into battle was actually like. . . . Bonnaire, who's seldom been better, gives a singular poignance to the line “I know what I must do, but at times I don't know how.”
January 1, 1996
The matter-of-factness of Rivette's treatment makes Jeanne la Pucelle in a very subtle way a commentary on the nature of historical destiny, which would explain the apparently risky choice of a subject which would appear to be desperately overworked. The film is an attempt at once to disengage Jeanne from the 'glamour' of her posterity and to imagine how tenuously constructed that glamour was.
August 1, 1995