The Messenger (1999)

Two days ago I watched The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) directed by Luc Besson. If you want to watch it, I watched it here

Here are some of my preliminary notes regarding the movie:

The voices are not featured in the movie at all. Whenever Joan talks about the experience she refers to an image of a boy who grows onto a man as the movie progresses. Once he is a man his face keeps bleeding in her visions. Then he grows into Dustin Hoffman who tries to convince Joan that she was not sent by God to carry out her mission, it was her own idea. The movie had a very different perspective than our show, as by the end it is made for the audience to believe that Joan made it up.

Also, the movie is completely focused on her battles. She is in battle 3/4 of the movie, and when she is not in battle, she is being tried for killing people in battle and wearing mens clothes. Thought it was interesting to see the opposite of our show, which is not focused on battle at all.

As mentioned before, the voices are in the form of a man, makes me think more and more that Sally made the voices women to connect them to the Old Religion

Jehanne portrayed as an odd ball since she was a child. Even the priest was sick of her being in church all the time.

Completely different version of finding the sword:

Isabelle stabbed and raped at the beginning of the movie?? Also as she is dying, she is asking  for God's forgiveness, which would not support Isabelle being of the Old Religion.

Made up a gimmick to see if Jehanne could find the try king, gets a messenger boy to play Charles. Gilles volunteers to be Charles, Charles says, "You would like that wouldn't you Gilles"

Gilles and Jehanne have PRETTY MUCH NO RELATIONSHIP. He makes fun of her, they battle together, he carries her inside when she gets shot by an arrow, that's it.

Important characters to the movie that are not in our show: Yolande of Aragon, Tremoy?, Jean de ma? (messenger boy)

George is not in the movie, Cauchon is always in the court

Huge emphasis on Jehanne writing to the King of England to ask them to surrender, multiple times.

Included the examination at Poitiers as a scene for some reason

Jehanne goes psycho by the end of the movie, progressively getting crazier and crazier. She has no self- confidence, just screams at everyone and waves her sword around, repeats the line, "I'm just the Messenger" over and over

Thought it was interesting when she gets shot with an arrow, one of the men say "If God sent her then why would he let her be wounded so bad." SACRIFICE

The only time Jehanne and Gilles kind of even have a little bit of a relationship is when he is concerned that she got hit with the arrow

Charles' mother in law (Yolande of Aragon) tainted the holy oil that crowned Charles King of France???? (Inciting incident that starts the falling action [everything going awry for Jehanne, burning])

The movie makes it for us to believe that Charles designs the opportunity to give Jehanne to Burgandy, the captains that she fought with in the battles give up all their money to save her, Charles gives it to Cauchon. Cauchon may be working in tandem with Burgandy and Charles to make sure she dies??

Then he gets scared that she could actually be sent by God and burning her would then be a bad choice so he tries to save her but it doesn't work because Dustin Hoffman convinces her to burn.

Dustin Hoffman credited as "The Conscience" ..

All in all, very different takes on the story then Sally Clarke's but definitely worth the watch to see the different choices. I want to do more digging to see how much they say the movie was based on research and how much was fiction. Still trying to find a good link to the Bergman movie