JOHANNA

Hungary, 2005, 86 minutes, Colour.
Orsolya Toth.
Directed by Kornel Mundruczo.

Johanna is a contemporary opera film from Hungary. Music lovers will find much to interest them in a work composed directly for the screen, the music adapted to the language of images, variety of angles and shots and editing pace. Those who are not opera fans may find the film a difficult experience.

It does not begin operatically. Rather, we are in the night streets of Budapest, traffic, an accident, victims being rushed to hospital where the staff are overworked. They speak. Once inside, the music begins. And then the singing.

By the end, most audiences will recognise the parallels with the passion and death of Jesus. It was only when reading the interview with the director afterwards that I realised that I had missed the parallels with the story of Joan of Arc. The director’s avowed intention was to present a modern interpretation of Joan of Arc.

This Johanna is not a saint. She is a drug addict in the hospital awaiting treatment. The wards and corridors are dark, dank and underground, rather medieval and prison-like. However, Johanna experiences a moment of grace and change. She feels called to comfort the patients who lie asleep, in coma or in pain, the male patients. Her gift is her sexuality and this is what she offers the men. Her sexuality and behaviour are seen as scandalous by the staff except for the doctor who lusts after her. Just as Joan of Arc was pursued by the authorities and judged as immoral, so Johanna is hounded and persecuted by this medical establishment and destroyed.

With its ‘spirituality’ of the woman who is the saint and martyr and who is exploited by men sexually, the film evokes memories of Breaking the Waves. Johanna shares a perspective on women and martyrs for men that Lars Von Trier developed in that film and continued in Dogville. Many women reacted badly to this exaltation of the suffering but exploited woman, seeing it as misogynist and that charge could be levelled at Johanna.

Just as von Trier’s film was visually operatic and stylised, Johanna is literally operatic and stylised – and provocative.