Le Tout nouveau testament (2015)
Directed by Jaco Van Dormael

Film Review

Jaco Van Dormael has had a hard time following his first two cinematic successes: Toto le héros (1991) and Le Huitième jour (1996), two wildly inventive films that established him as one of the Belgium film industry's most promising talents at a time when it was experiencing a sudden and dramatic renaissance.   More than a decade elapsed before he made his third film, the extravagant sci-fi spectacular Mr Nobody (2009), but this proved to be a massive flop and might well have put the kibosh on any future filmmaking aspirations.  But then, after staging his live dance and cinema crossover Kiss & Cry (2011), Van Dormael returns with his zaniest film yet, a totally unhinged religious satire that almost makes the Pythons' Life of Brian (1979) appear a tad reverential in its mockery of all things Christian.

Le Tout Nouveau Testament (a.k.a. The Brand New Testament) is so caught up in its exuberant comicbook absurdity that it is unlikely to offend anyone other than the most hard-line of Christian fundamentalists, so any religious backlash (of the kind that accompanied the release of the Pythons' film) is unlikely.  Things have clearly moved on since those bad old days when a person risked being roasted alive or dismembered in public for subscribing to the 'wrong version' of Christianity.  Imagine the fate that would have fallen Van Dormael in an earlier century if he had dared to portray the Garden of Eden as Brussels city centre inhabited by all manner of exotic fauna, with the Almighty shown to be a sadistic bully happily engaged in sowing universal disharmony with the help of his clapped-out laptop computer.

You can't imagine any filmmaker being brave enough to give Islam this kind of lunatic ribbing, and there's a certain irony, if not poignancy, in the fact that his film was released in the very same year as the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which was prompted by the weekly paper's publication of satirical cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.  With so much cruelty and injustice in the world, it's hard not think of God as the kind of cruel puppetmaster that Van Dormael imagines him as being - and this is perhaps what the film is really mocking, our childish need to blame it all on someone, rather than an attack on Christianity as such.  The director is unlikely to get a Fatwa for his God-bashing flight of fancy, but if he gets struck down by lightning in the next twelve months we'll probably know the reason why.
  
Le Tout Nouveau Testament's first half chugs along amiably enough as it lurches into the philosophical conundrum of how knowing the precise time of our expiration will affect how we live our lives.  Those with years to spare will inevitably lead more reckless lives - witness one character repeating one suicidal stunt after another, confident in the knowledge that he is incapable of killing himself - whilst those nearer to death's door hastily reappraise their priorities to get as much as they can out of the time that remains.  Van Dormael's fertile imagination allows him to extract a great deal of comedy mileage from this single premise, but ultimately the ideas run out and for the film's second half he goes chasing after another comedy hare, alas one which doesn't deliver half as many laughs.

Pursued by her suitably miffed father (who art in a dreary Belgian squat rather than that other place with pearly gates), the Almighty's troublesome daughter sets about aping her long-lost older bro by gathering a new set of apostles.  Following her debut in the Dardenne brothers' Deux jours, une nuit (2014), Pili Groyne looks every inch a future star of French cinema as she zips through the film looking like a slightly younger version of Amélie Poulain and Louis Malle's hyperactive Zazie. The weird ensemble that the mischievous pre-teen brings together include a serial killer with a soft centre (François Damiens), a little boy resolved to change his sex, a woman who lost her hand in an accident, and a late middle-aged looker who falls head over heels in love with a gorilla (not the first big hairy ape that Catherine Deneuve has had to share a bed with on screen).  Allusions to earlier films - notably Nagisa Ôshima's Max Mon Amour (1986) and Alain Berliner's Ma vie en rose (1997) - fall thick and fast as Van Dormael exhausts his own ideas bank and starts raiding other people's, but whilst the humour flags towards the end, the director's infectious sense of fun just about stays the course, helped by some colourful performances from a predominantly Belgian crowd (Deneuve being the one non-Belgian).  The only letdown is that the wonderful Yolande Moreau (who plays Mrs God) gets so little to do - probably because her character features so little in the official Biblical text.

It was another off-the-wall Belgian comedy - C'est arrivé près de chez vous (1992) - that launched Benoît Poelvoorde's screen career, and since then the actor has made a career playing wacky misfits and losers of varying degrees of weirdness, so who better than him to take on Van Dormael's conception of a slobby and spiteful God? - the kind of all-powerful deity who can't be bothered to change out of his pyjamas and spends all day beating up the wife and kiddie whilst dreaming up ways to make mankind's lot more miserable than it is already.  Of course, the downside is that after playing the most powerful being in creation (Donald Trump excepted), Poelvoorde's subsequent career can only be a downer, but who could throw up the opportunity to portray God as a malicious boor whose imaginative faculties are mostly preoccupied with dreaming up variations on Murphy's Law?  It's a heaven-sent gift of a part for Belgium's most dependably funny actor and he doesn't disappoint.  If Poelvoorde gets struck down by lightning in the next twelve months, we'll probably know the reason why.  Let's hope The Big Guy has a sense of humour.

Film Synopsis

The good news is that God exists.  The bad news is that He lives in Brussels and is a complete and utter bastard.  Not content with making life Hell for his wife and ten-year-old daughter Ea, He spends his days inflicting as much misery as He can on the humans he created for his own amusement.  The pleasure the Almighty gets from slaughtering his creations in grandiose catastrophes is surpassed only by his love of inventing new laws that drive them to distraction, laws such as the one that insists a human's phone will always ring as soon as he gets into a bath.  Far from being in awe of her father's malevolence, Ea is disgusted by it and decides to get her own back by hacking into his computer and sending a text message to everyone on Earth revealing the exact date of his or her death.  Taking the advice of her older brother Jesus, who has long given up on God, Ea then finds a way to Earth and starts recruiting six more apostles.  Never a good example on the anger management front, God is livid when He discovers His daughter's treachery and has no option but to go after her.  He has, after all, a reputation to live up to...