Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc

The current peak of festival high concept. Whereas Slack Bay was a coherent genre farce, Jeannette is purely anarchistic hokum that raises a middle finger to the established rules of cinema. This musical revealing the idiocy of musicals by yielding to the set design, editing and rhythmic choreography is shot through with a load of fatalistic proclamations about faith, history and nationalism, while here and there something important appears, only to soon be replaced by autotelic nonsense. The sanctimonious group of losers from Nouvelle Star push Dumont’s trolling beyond the previous limit of targeted ridicule to the festival audience, which is something only Takeshi Kitano had previously taken the liberty of doing. Whether the spectator stays at the screening or leaves, it is both a defeat and a win. And of course, if the film hadn’t had a famous director’s name attached to it, would we be be talking about provocations, or only about a fiasco? I hope Dumont’s next act is a sci-fi flick with real-time animated shit; he definitely has a premiere in Cannes in the bag. (02.07.2017)