By: Margot K Juby

Margot K Juby — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:18:54 +0000

It’s a disappointment that the film will be based on a novel, but it’s not a documentary. It will be fiction anyway. And at least it uses her correct name, Jehanne, rather than the horrible anglicisation “Joan of Arc”.

Kenneally’s is a pretty good book & one of very few, fiction or fact, that mentions Gilles de Rais even glancingly. Joanites don’t like him, & like to pretend that Jehanne barely knew of his existence. In fact, he was her official protector & saved her life at least twice. He almost certainly planned to rescue her from Rouen.

He was also unofficially rehabilitated in 1992 & most thinking people who are acquainted with his story see him as as a French hero stitched up by a poisonous coalition of the Inquisition & his political enemies.

That was not how Keneally (writing in the 1970s) saw him, & it won’t be how Luhrmann presents him. Prepare yourself for yet another rawhead-&-bloody-bones extravaganza where “Bluebeard” eats live kittens for breakfast & the popcorn-munching audience assumes every word is true.

By: CGesange

CGesange — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 10:28:01 +0000

Of all the many dozens of reviews of “Blood Red, Sister Rose” that I’ve read, this is the first which claims it has a lesbian subplot. In any event, the novel is almost entirely fictitious and portrays Joan of Arc as the opposite of the real person on virtually all points. We have numerous vivid eyewitness accounts by people who knew her, as well as letters dictated to scribes by Joan of Arc herself (one of which was famously recently featured in a British Library exhibit on medieval women), and all of these show her to have been a devout Catholic who emphasized her virginity and especially opposed all forms of sexual sin. Even her enemies never accused her of having lesbian tendencies, nor most of the other traits that the novel invents; nor was Charles VII ever accused of gay affairs, nor was Jehan de Metz. Eyewitnesses at her trial said that the reason she continued wearing the so-called “male clothing” – which in reality was just a soldier’s horseback-riding outfit – was because it allowed her to keep all the parts “securely laced and tied” together to hinder her English guards from pulling her clothing off; and in the end the guards manipulated her into a “relapse” to justify a conviction by taking away her dress and forcing her to put the soldier’s outfit back on, according to the bailiff, Jehan Massieu. The book was deliberately written to turn history upside down. Hopefully the movie won’t do the same.

Comments on: Baz Luhrmann’s Upcoming ‘Joan of Arc’ Film Is Based on a Surprisingly Queer Book

By: Margot K Juby

By: CGesange