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Pyre to heaven, the maid still shackled. "How did I end up here?" The inspired mind laid bare, Joan suspended between excommunication and canonization, Ingrid Bergman amid chorales in lyrically accented Italian. A painted constellation in the gloom comprises her proscenium, Fra Domenico (Tullio Carminati) is her companion. "Heretic. Witch. Apostate." The trial back on earth is revisited, she recalls a farcical menagerie—a jury of sheep, a donkey translating Latin, a porcine persecutor swelling around the courtroom. "Ego sum Porcus." Kings, queens and knaves, their rituals and games under colored filters. The voices in her head are distant chimes, lovingly named Catherine and Marguerite. Elements swirling in the cosmic void, a suite of images for the spirit in flux. "From the depths of the abyss, I have raised my soul to God my lord." Paul Claudel's libretto set to Arthur Honegger's music, an oratorio filmed by Roberto Rossellini as a parting gift to the anxious muse. (It's a riposte to Fleming's Joan of Arc as much as Fear is a counterpart to Cukor's Gaslight.) Angelic circles in the gloom, a glimpse of Domrémy through cardboard clouds. Sword named "Amore" in one hand and flag in the other, gift of Saint Michael and hint of Liliom. "Com'è bello essere la figlia di Dio." Not recorded theater but an experiment in form and representation, stagecraft and medieval painting reconfigured as coruscating film syntax, artifice heightened and illuminated as only a neo-realist can. The chains fall amid flames in the climactic miracle, a question of faith in the mystery of divine ways and in the madness of exploratory filmmakers. "I will burn like a gracious candle." Preminger takes an analytic tack with Saint Joan, and Powell in Bluebeard's Castle returns the compliment to The Tales of Hoffmann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |