I wasn’t sure this weekend whether to watch this acknowledged silent classic version of the Joan of Arc story or Luc Besson’s lavish 1999 production first. I might’ve better understood what I wrote about the manic style of Milla Jovovich’s performance in The Messenger had I watched them the other way around – she was clearly trying to bring something of Maria Falconetti’s performance here in, in the same way there are some visual references I noticed like the cut between Jeanne’s burning face and the cross in the sky etc – but certainly watching that English language version first helped me understand the odd bits of the French interstitials here that I couldn’t quite translate (the DVD player’s still having problems with subtitles, lol – I was pretty impressed with myself how well I coped though :))

The difference between Jovovich and Falconetti’s performances is hard to put into words that don’t include, simply, “Falconetti’s is just better” – where Jovovich, like I said, came off mostly as plain crazy, Falconetti’s wide-eyed gazing comes across more like a superhuman degree of conviction obstructed by a mind too young and human to quite comprehend it; ie, simply closer to “the truth”. A sizable portion of the movie consists of simple headshots of her reacting to the men around her. It shouldn’t be anywhere near as compelling and hypnotic as it is … but it really is the greatest performance, male or female, I’ve ever seen and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of it on any number of repeat viewings.

This is before you even touch upon the aspects of the film outside of her performance. Though, like I said, it’s full of a lot of plain headshots, there are some camera moves that perhaps by sheer contrast blew my mind a little, like the rolling move that follows soldiers from an aerial angle to one level with the ground; one that tracks the spikes of a torture device down to the ground; another weird almost queasy motion while Jeanne burns, following maces thrown down to guards from a tower, up and back again, up and back again.

It’s not often I’m so immediately impressed by movies as old as this – though I consider myself to have a wider knowledge of cinema than most, it never really struck me as a given that older productions should necessarily be somehow better than modern stuff by default. Then you get exceptions like this – it is one of those movies, as François Truffaut has said, that simply “vibrates”, in this case sometimes so violently that it threatens to burst out of the screen. It amazes me that there are people who dismiss it so quickly as “just headshots” ... it’s the person who’s in those headshots. For the performance alone it’s a masterpiece. But it’s so much more besides.

I worried for a moment that this was gonna be another movie to suffer from the “Jane Eyre syndrome”. Jane Valentine, the young girl who plays Jeanne d’Arc here aged 8, is not only extraordinary, powerful, everything I in my limited knowledge associate with this person and story, not only is she a dead ringer for Milla Jovovich in the eyes, but she’s also onscreen for a hell of a longer time than I ever would’ve expected. Unfortunately, following her breaking into the church and taking mass underage, it jumpcuts forward so harshly that if I weren’t watching on the TV I’d have feared a whole reel was missing.

When Milla Jovovich appears, she’s so alternately whimpering and up-in-arms it’s at times unintentionally laughable. She, or Luc Besson, or maybe someone else involved, seems intent on showing Joan’s fear under the circumstances and I don’t know if it works, at least not the way they do it. The whole movie, as a matter of fact, suffers similarly from its own desire to entertain and be epic and commercial, etc, and I’m not sure Besson’s frequently boyish direction (you wouldn’t expect it, but some of the goggle-eyed raving here is extraordinarily reminiscent of Jean Reno in Leon) is so suited to this particular story. The occasional attempts at deliberate humour (“There’s an arrow in your leg.” “Oh. So there is.”) didn’t go down well for me either.

It certainly happens upon some stirring and memorable moments … Eric Serra’s score is reassuringly sweeping, there’s some surprising gore in the battle scenes … and ultimately I did find myself believing even in Jovovich’s manic Joan as a leader – if only because she’s sold so much as a gal who did something while everyone else was talking about doing things. The dodgy reshoot hair on Jovovich that I think I’ve heard Mark Kermode mention a few times in talking about this movie didn’t really bug me as much as I expected either – going back to the Leon similarity, she actually looks a lot like Natalie Portman’s Mathilda in her last prison scene. I’m looking forward even more to seeing the old Carl Dreyer silent now, though.