DAMES AT WAR : 'The Messenger' & 'Dogma'.

The nuns at school had told me Shakespeare was great and so, twelve years old, I tuned in public television to watch the BBC's An Age of Kings, Shakespeare's English history plays done in chronological order. The nuns were right. I loved the pageantry and the bugle flourishes and the bellowing and, most of all, the swordplay. But the good sisters had even more often told me that Joan of Arc was one of the greatest saints in the Christian calendar, so you can imagine my Catholic schoolboy shock when, in the middle of Henry VI Part 1, "Joan Pucelle," routed by the English forces on the plains of Anjou, paused midflight to pray to certain "speedy helpers." The camera zoomed in on Joan's eyes and we saw demons dancing there who, fickle as only fiends can be, now denied her their protection even when she offered to "lop a member off, and give it you/ In earnest of a further benefit. " Joan of Arc a witch? Feeding fiends with her own blood! Yipes!!

After the first shock, there is no other. Perhaps this is why the latest Joan drama, The Messenger, leaves me amused and intrigued rather than dismayed. As written by Andrew Birkin and Luc Besson (also the director) and enacted by Milla Jovovich, this Jeanne d'Arc is as much a creature for our time as Shakespeare's was for his. Just as a post-Reformation English audience needed a witch, we require a noble neurotic seen through a Grand Guignol prism because ours is a rationalistic age which, paradoxically, loves to sup on horrors. Though a genius such as Carl Dreyer dared to offer, in his The Passion of Joan of Arc, "a solemnly militant, whole-souled woman refusing to abdicate the moral of her life" (film critic Parker Tyler), a lesser man must cater to the zeitgeist. (Shakespeare was not yet a titan when he gave us his vivid caricature.) And so Besson's Jeanne d'Arc is as sick-souled as they come and, at the movie's climax, renounces her worldly actions as the products of self- delusion.

She begins as an escapee from The Sound of Music, confessing to an exasperated priest thrice a day (which turns the poor cleric into a high- school guidance counselor: "Is everything all right at home, Jeanne?"). Tripping merrily down sun-dappled hills and across flower-bedecked meadows, grooving on her own purity and closeness to God, this barely pubescent girl has a vision of Christ as a solemn child. Then a sword appears beside her on the grass just before the sunshine morphs into green gloom and foreboding. A company of enemy soldiers raids her village and their officer murders and rapes (yes, in that order) her older sister. Tormented by a guilty conscience (her sister surrendered her hiding place to Jeanne), our heroine transforms herself into a warrior who will simultaneously avenge her sibling and mystically unite herself with Christ. And since her sister tried to defend herself with a blade against an attacker who sneered, "Oh, a woman with a sword, " Jeanne becomes that very "woman with a sword" at whom Brit warriors will sneer at their peril. She wins the Dauphin's confidence, raises the siege at Orleans, sees her prince crowned, suffers betrayal into the hands of the English, and is thrown into prison.

At this point, The Messenger takes a queer turn indeed, but an interesting one. In her cell, Jeanne is confronted by a phantom (Dustin Hoffman at his most saturnine) who proceeds to show the girl that her entire military mission is founded on a delusion. Who is this phantom? (In the credits he's listed as The Conscience, but why does a peasant girl's conscience talk like a psychiatrist?) Since he identifies himself as an aged version of the sad child in Jeannne's childhood vision, mustn't we take him to be Christ? I kept anticipating that he would sooner or later drop his holy credentials, turn out to be the devil (like the satanic little girl in The Last Temptation of Christ), and get the heave-ho by Jeanne, who would then go, head high, to her blazing martyrdom.

I was naive. Luc Besson is very much a creature of our time, and for him chivalry is dead and buried, and he doesn't mind enlisting Jesus to hold the stake that he wants to drive through the corpse's heart. This phantasmal Jesus cum Grand Inquisitor cum medieval Freud, leads Jeanne through the turning points of her life, makes her see how she misinterpreted her "voices" for the sake of relieving her neuroses by way of a glorious crusade, and finally elicits from her the confession that "I did all the things people do for a cause." In context, those "things" include warfare's indiscriminate slaughter. Like Raskolnikov, like the hero of Darkness at Noon, like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, this Jeanne d'Arc of Luc Besson and Andrew Birkin is an idealist who besmirched herself for the sake of a vision and now, seeing the blood on her hands, renounces the vision itself.

The movie is executed with bruising gusto. Besson, like Ken Russell and Oliver Stone, is a director of great skill and no subtlety. (He didn't need subtlety for his excellent espionage melodrama, La Femme Nikita.) During the murder of Jeanne's sister, a subtle director would have kept his camera trained on Jeanne cowering in her hiding place, her face registering the horrors she hears. But Besson serves up murder and rape as a feast for the senses with close shots of the sword slicing through the body, blood trickling out of the victim's mouth, etc., etc. In fact, all the forces in the movie-actors, horses, war machines, natural elements-are launched straight at the viewer all the time. There is little sense of proportion, everything is fortissimo.

Besson has, however, learned some maneuvers from old cinematic masters. He's obviously studied The Passion of Joan of Arc and tries to attain the Dreyerian effect that Pauline Kael described so well: "Dreyer turns the camera on the faces of Joan and the judges, and in giant close-ups he reveals his interpretation of their emotions. In this enlargement, Joan and her persecutors are shockingly fleshly-isolated with their sweat, warts, spittle, and tears, and (as no one in the film used makeup) with startlingly individual contours, features, and skin." Something like that effect obtains in the new movie, but here we are not so much interpreting emotions (Besson's schematic approach doesn't allow us the freedom to interpret) as flipping through a book of mug shots. Similarly, Besson assembles his Orleans battle much as Orson Welles edited the combat at Shrewsbury in Chimes at Midnight-they both orchestrate fragments of slaughter instead of broad vistas. But Welles's battle really was a symphony while Besson's is just a series of shrewd gross-outs and shocks.

On the plus side, the management of the Jeanne-Phantom colloquies is claustrophobically powerful and inventive, and Milla Jovovich's performance, composed at first of shrieks and eye-popping because her director wanted her to seem psychologically tortured, gets progressively better as the movie grows more introspective. In the supporting cast, John Malkovich turns his always unsettling personality to good account as the Dauphin, and Tcheky Karyo convinces as Dunois, a sane soldier near the end of his tether.

At its best, The Messenger approaches art and even at its worst is pretty enjoyable high camp. But, all in all, the movie is skin deep. When this Maid of Orleans is charred at the stake, you just can't believe her psychoanalyzed spirit marches on.

Bethany, the heroine of Dogma, could be considered a modern American Joan of Arc, though that would slight Bethany. The Maid of Orleans, after all, merely had to rescue France from England while Bethany's supernatural enlistment officer, the angel Metatron, sends her to stop two fallen angels from finding redemption at a church in New Jersey, a redemption that would reverse God's judgment and thereby annihilate all existence.

This mission-from-God stuff is just a framework on which the writer- director Kevin Smith hangs a lot of good and bad gags designed to tweak organized religion in general and the Roman Catholic faith in particular. I laughed or groaned at the jokes, but was all too familiar with the mentality producing them to take any offense. Sitting around dormitory rooms or cafeteria tables during my years at Catholic U., I encountered countless wiseacres who might have ceased going to Mass but were satirically obsessed with Catholic dogma, hierarchy, mores, and style. They were always forthcoming with fantasy-scenarios featuring such situations as God coming down to earth and...God's a woman! a pro- abortion feminist woman! who's...uh...black and...no, wait, I've got it, a black lesbian with a leather fetish. Now guess what happens when she calls the pope on the carpet! It never took long to recognize that the raconteur was like a bewildered, discarded wife obsessed with the quirks of her ex-husband, though she wouldn't take him back even if he came crawling. So, whether Dogma is cutting-edge art or a blot on human decency, there can't be any doubt that it's an inside job.

As storytelling, it's a mess. Kevin Smith keeps putting obstacles in the path of his narrative and the plot falls over every single one of them. Just one example among multitudes: While writing the script, Smith must have realized that even if Bethany doesn't rescue humanity, God could always intervene. So, for the sake of suspense, he invents an explanation that God is trapped in the body of a patient on life support. Lame.

Still, I liked the movie's insolence, its occasionally eloquent dialogue (especially Metatron's touching monologue about how he had to tell the child Jesus of his fate), its special effects (God literally roars Ben Affleck's head off-cool!), the way Smith uses over-the-top violence to give an apocalyptic charge to the last segment of his story without dispelling its comic nature, and, most of all, the way Salma Hayek, as a muse-angel turned stripper, chews bubble gum while dancing on top of a bar. Also not to be sniffed at are two excellent performances: Alan Rickman as Metatron, who has the funniest lines in the script, and Linda Fiorentino as Bethany, who has no funny lines whatsoever but who, in the midst of bodies falling out of the sky and rebel angels slaughtering New Jersey congregations, still manages to convey more sense of divine mission than ever prevails in The Messenger.

And a very Merry Christmas to The Catholic League.