After making Joan of Arc's childhood into a hard-rock musical, in the vein of Jesus Christ Superstar—but on a much smaller scale—Belgian filmmaker Bruno Dumont did the only natural thing: he made a sequel. As before, he draws from Charles Péguy's epic poem Jeanne d'Arc. Now 10 years old, Joan (Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc's Lise Leplat-Prudhomme) remains among the living, and the setting, the windswept region of Pas de Calais, remains the same, though Dumont later shifts the action to the stunning Amiens Cathedral with its impossibly high ceilings and gold-leaf detail before ending with a straw-filled World War II bunker. He begins in 1429, four years after Jeannette ended, proceeding to recreate specific days in her life until everything came to a fiery halt in 1431 by which point the real-life Joan was in her late-teens (in Jeannette, Jeanne Voisin played Joan as a teenager).
He represents each day by way of inter titles. In between conversations with the men she meets along the way, the young army leader appears in a series of unconventional musical sequences. In one, she rides a horse that dances to the beat of a military drum corps. Then, Dumont takes advantage of drone technology to film her from above as Joan and her troops construct dressage-oriented geometric shapes. It's an especially stylized way to represent a battle, since he doesn't depict any weapons or injuries, but the dance ultimately ends in defeat. In other sequences, Joan stares straight ahead or up at the sky as the late Christophe's falsetto voice plays in her head (Leplat-Prudhomme never actually sings). Unlike Dumont's first film, no head-banging sequences appear in this more somber follow-up, while the lyrics, which exalt God and King, act as a form of narration. From the field of battle, Joan enters the cathedral-based courtroom, where male inquisitors (played by area academics and historians) accuse her of abandoning her family, posing as a man, and committing heresy.
If Dumont's feminist aims weren't clear before, Joan's resistance to doubt and intimidation makes her the most powerful figure in the film, even as that power gets turned against her. Leplat-Prudhomme isn't the most expressive actress, but Dumont tends to prefer inexperienced or minimalist performers who bring an unstudied freshness. The one exception arrives in the form of Fabrice Luchini (Dumont's Slack Bay), who makes a brief, if welcome appearance as King Charles VII. While other portrayals of Joan of Arc have questioned whether she had a direct hotline to God, Dumont prioritizes more Earthly matters, since all of the men in the film, including the soldiers at the end, believe she should've remained a humble shepherdess, regardless as to her religious and political convictions. His two-part tale joins previous French-language depictions by Robert Bresson and Jacques Rivette and English-language depictions by Otto Preminger and Luc Besson. If his films feature less action and fewer extras, he's found a unique way to make an old story feel new—and even a little surprising. Recommended.