Le tout nouveau testament
Jaco Van Dormael (2015)
‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’ complains Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. In other words, God deserves to be badmouthed because he isn’t there. Francis Spufford adapts Beckett’s line slightly and its meaning significantly when he uses the phrase ‘he-doesn’t-exist-the-bastard’ in his clever and appealing book Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense. Here, the profanity reflects a paradoxical anger at God for allowing bad things to happen as well as for failing to exist. Spufford sometimes uses the phrase to express the point of view of a putative atheist but he also notes that:
‘The life of faith has just as many he-doesn’t-exist-the-bastard moments as the life of disbelief. Probably more of them, if anything, given that we believers tend to return to the subject more often, producing many more opportunities to be disappointed.’
Jaco Van Dormael’s The Brand New Testament seems to assume that belief in an all-powerful and benevolent deity is nonsense and to want to convey this by presenting God the Father as an incompetently nasty piece of work. In the twenty-first century, God (Benoît Poelvoorde) lives in a Brussels apartment, with his doormat wife (Yolande Moreau) and his ten-year-old daughter Ea (Pili Groyne). He’s a slob and a sadist – in his treatment both of his wife and daughter and of humankind generally. His purpose is to make people’s lives terrible; he controls the world through a clunky, outdated personal computer. Ea rebels against God’s tyranny. She gains access to the computer and finds on it the pre-determined date of death of every human being. Ea releases this information to interested parties in the form of individualised text messages. She then locks the computer and escapes the apartment through a chute in the laundry room. In the outside world, Ea decides to sort-of follow the example of her brother Jesus. She engages a dyslexic vagrant (Marco Lorenzini, who has a look of Michel Simon) to be the scribe of a Brand New Testament. This will record the lives of six new apostles, selected by Ea.
The dark tones of the film are visual rather than thematic. (Van Dormael’s images, as realised by the cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, sometimes bring to mind the surreal grunge of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen.) I don’t know why I expect a satirical philosophical fantasy of this kind to be intellectually rigorous but I do and The Brand New Testament disappoints because it isn’t. Jaco Van Dormael and his co-writer Thomas Gunzig operate rather on a wouldn’t-it-be-a-great-idea-if-we basis. The answer nearly always turns out to be no. The dates of death element is one example of the sloppy, having-it-both-ways script – and not just because Van Dormael and Gunzig don’t address the fact that not everyone in Brussels, let alone throughout the world, has the technical means to receive a text. God is incensed when he discovers what Ea has done. He says that his power over human beings depended on their ignorance of exactly when they would die, that this ignorance made them cautious, and that they’ll now do just what they want. It’s unclear why God thinks this in the first place but there’s little evidence of people turning carefree on receipt of the text – except for a feeble running joke involving a young man who, knowing he’s destined to live another sixty-two years, makes spectacular attempts to kill himself in the sure and certain knowledge that he’ll fail. The death dates are eventually cancelled, as part of the film’s happy ending. This is presented as good news for humanity although, according to the logic of the earlier part of the story, it should be better news for God if people are returned to the uncertainty which kept them in thrall. (Unless I missed it, there’s no suggestion that human beings will be immortal in the new order.)
The limits of God’s knowledge and power are defined by what Van Dormael and Gunzig need to take the story forward. Infuriated that his computer is locked and unable to do anything about it, God follows Ea through the laundry chute and into the world beyond the apartment – so that he can, through his boorish behaviour, fall out with everyone whose path he crosses. He then finds that he can’t get back into the apartment, is mistaken for an illegal immigrant and is finally deported to Uzbekistan. Since the God of The Brand New Testament is (a) a take on the vengeful plague-sender of the Old Testament and (b) incarnate deity, the film-makers have a problem with what to do with Jesus Christ. The solution is, in effect, to drop the Christ aspect (though not according to the names in the cast list). Jesus (David Murgia) is an animated plaster figurine, who lives on a shelf in the God family home and with whom Ea occasionally converses before she goes forth into Brussels. God despises his son as a benevolent fool, who insisted on doing his own thing and got himself killed. The Brand New Testament doesn’t extend beyond making fun of the patriarchal Almighty into a larger satire of religious belief – although a conscientious priest (Johan Heldenbergh) is so exasperated by God that they have a punch-up in a Brussels church. Pili Groyne’s Ea, who admits she doesn’t know how much she can control, is a sweet-natured presence. And being a goddess is fine. When God fails to return home, his formerly downtrodden wife manages to unlock the computer and to change life on earth ‘for the better’ (I use inverted commas because, although this is the film’s implication, I don’t get what ‘for the better’ means). Jaco Van Dormael did well to cast in the role of God’s wife the naturally and likeably eccentric Yolande Moreau (she was the title character in Séraphine) and the relatively light-hearted domestic and personal details of The Brand New Testament, which centre on her, are mildly amusing. There are twelve apostles because there are twelve players in an ice-hockey team and God is an ice-hockey fan. Ea decides on an extra six because eighteen is the number in her mother’s preferred sport of baseball. As she cleans the apartment, God’s wife observes the new apostles appearing one by one in a painting of the Last Supper, which she dusts regularly.
Hopes that at least one of Ea’s chosen six might turn out to be interesting gradually fade. Hopes that they might interact amusingly are mostly disappointed too – except for the moment when one of the apostles, the natural-born killer François (François Damiens), shoots at another, Aurélie (Laura Verlinden). This young woman was badly injured in a childhood accident with an underground train: the bullet from the gun enters not her flesh but her prosthetic arm. François takes her survival as a divine signal. He opts for life instead of death by forming a loving relationship with Aurélie, who was convinced until now that she was unlovable because of her disability. Jean-Claude (Didier De Neck) hates his job and decides to spend the rest of his days on a park bench (how reckless is that?) until Ea persuades him to travel to the Arctic Circle. Marc (Serge Larivière) has been sex-obsessed but sexually frustrated ever since a transient meeting in boyhood with a beautiful German girl whom he now meets again. Martine (Catherine Deneuve) is the trophy wife of a man (Johan Leysen) who’s nearly as unpleasant as God but considerably better-dressed. Ea encourages Martine to cheat on the husband and she does so. She starts with a male prostitute (Bilal Aya) and graduates to a gorilla, which does everyone a favour by beating up Martine’s husband. The sixth and last apostle is Willy (Romain Gelin), a sickly young boy with a life expectancy of only a few days. He decides to live his remaining life ‘as a girl’, which amounts to putting on a dress and continuing to look and behave otherwise like a boy. Ea gives each of her apostles a piece of theme music. Willy’s is Charles Trenet’s ‘La Mer’. The most enjoyable moment in the whole film is supplied by the underwater gurgle made by a cartoon fish as it sings along.
28 April 2016
