But, of course, it would have been better if he never existed. Because he is a balding middle-aged misanthrope, who created the world out of boredom and is currently having fun by setting people against one another (the screen shows a sequence of black-and-white dramas about religious wars and crimes committed to glorify God), sets up various troubles, and writes “laws of universal nonsense” – the same rules, according to which a sandwich always falls on the side where the jam is spread, and the line next to you moves faster than yours.
But the tyrant doesn’t have only a son, whose crucified images mark all the churches. There is another kid, with no less warm heart, 10-year-old daughter Ea, who, when an opportunity arises, at first tells people the dates when they will die, which, for example, stops all armed conflicts, and then runs away to the world and starts creating her own Testament.
Satirical comedy Le Tout Nouveau Testament (The Brand New Testament) is the fourth feature film by 58-year-old Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael (it was released by the company Arthouse Traffic), and judging by everything, it is his most successful work: Belgium has already submitted the picture for the Academy Award.
In a sense, The Brand New Testament is an intellectual joke, a kind of an exercise of a skeptical Descartes intellect. Ea (she is the narrator) finds six apostles of her teaching, common residents of Brussels. All of them bear their own mischief and their own burden of loneliness, and in the heart of each one of them there is special music, which only a daughter of God can hear: from refined-melancholic Henri Purcell to circus fanfares. On the whole, the film is a catalog of creative borrowings: for example, you can clearly see the images and situations from Lewis Carroll, Bunuel, Tarkovsky; one of the wittiest allusions of the kind is when Catherine Deneuve’s heroine, who, realizing what she wants, starts living with a gorilla (hello from King Kong and France-made comedy by Japanese classic Nagisa Oshima, Max, My Love (1986), where Charlotte Rampling’s heroine had a sexual intercourse with a chimpanzee). However, and this is an important point, all the allusions are in a masterful and ironic way played by the director, included in a new field of meaning, owing to which history acquires a multicultural sounding, which is necessary here.
An atheist comedy is not a new genre, but it is a complicated task to shoot it in a witty way. Dormael succeeded. The Brand New Testament is funny indeed, moderately snappish, and enough lyrical; sadness, joy, and sarcasm are well-balanced here. In a sense, we are looking at our monotheistic patriarchal world through the eyes of a 10-year-old child and are surprised why there are so much absurdity, so many nonsensical bans and sufferings.
Together with Dormael’s characters we finally find a way out: all bans and biases are removed, and the humanity, in spite of the fears of moralists, becomes better and happier. This faith in man, the warm internal light imbuing The Brand New Testament, is what makes the film unforgettable.
In Kyiv you can watch The Brand New Testament in original language with Ukrainian subtitles in Zhovten Movie Theater.
