Critics reviews

I didn't see this coming: THE SON OF JOSEPH, writer/director Eugène Green's stylized, deadpan satire, turns out to be a non-ironic Christian allegory about love and resistance. While it's rather unclassifiable, I laughed much harder here than at many so-called comedies. Straightaway, it establishes a dialogue between present and past: cars whiz by in today's Paris against sacred Baroque music.

One might be tempted to say that Green accomplishes the not-as-unlikely-as-it-sounds fusion of Bresson and Kaurismaki. But this would be inaccurate, because "Son of Joseph" doesn't actually feel like a fusion or pastiche. Green is on to his own thing, and while it takes some getting used to, it ultimately provides big rewards both in entertainment and Stuff with a Capital S (its adaptation and elaboration of Biblical themes posits some worthwhile moral propositions).

The movie's spare, sharp dialogue offers some sublime and original theological reflections and revisitations of Old and New Testament themes that are more than asides—they're the characters' own guideposts for action. Yet the movie's vast thematic scope and its high moral purpose are joined to a cinematic vision that's also mightily, incisively comedic.

There's a lightness to Green's touch, and a gentle beauty to many of his images, that redeems these flaws and even courts the sublime. While I'm not sure Son of Joseph, his latest, reaches that level, it has its moments, and given how preposterous and labored the film often is, that's nothing to scoff at.

Green's pursuit of purity is also a pursuit of symmetry, and like most of his films, The Son Of Joseph blurs the line between running gags and symbolic motifs, whimsical parodies and allegories. It's overlong, but behind its jabs at literary pretension, droll punchlines, and minimalist sight gags lies a search for the kind of guidance that parables used to impart.

Mr. Green's taste for frontal compositions and clipped editing sometimes recalls the filmmaker Robert Bresson, although Bresson wasn't known for his throwaway humor. (Probably not many teenagers' bedrooms include replicas of Caravaggio's "The Sacrifice of Isaac," and Maria de Medeiros has a funny role as a perpetually confused literary critic.) "The Son of Joseph" can be trying in its whimsy, yet it builds to a lovely finale that evokes the Bible, the French Resistance and the surreal.

The art-history lessons typify Green's reverence of the past, obeisance that is further evident in the filmmaker's signature use of mannered, declaimed dialogue and other nods to classical French theater... Yet nothing buoys the occasionally claustrophobic Son of Joseph more than the radiant, freckled face of newcomer Ezenfis: Vincent may insist that "an angel" instructed him to set up his mother and Joseph, but the real love story is between the boy and his older friend.

Some viewers may be quick to dismiss The Son of Joseph, a whimsical take on the Nativity story, for its familiar narrative and stripped-down style. But it is precisely the clarity of expression achieved through simplification that makes for the mystifying beauty of Green's film. His approach to composition and staging, deeply informed by Baroque art, rests on a clash between harmony and movement.

The film does manage to catch you off guard, mixing absurdism and sincerity, comedy and tragedy, the realistic and the surreal, the modern and the classical and, finally, pulsing emotion and brittle formalism. The Son of Joseph actually makes for the perfect entry point for brave travellers looking to explore the wonderful world of this singular director.

A builder of sorts, Green gives prime importance to harmoniousness of form, and his film ends with a radical reconfiguration of the same set of figures that it begins with: a couple, a lone figure and an animal. The first configuration includes Vincent, two twisted teenagers and the trapped rat they are tormenting with long needles in a dingy hideaway. The last includes Vincent, his newly united parents and that gentle donkey walking in open air. What a pleasure it is to step into the light.

Green brings to The Son of Joseph his characteristic compositional precision, an appreciation for Baroque art and music, and a distinctive way of filming conversations... The film's rigorous design does not prevent it from exuding hope and a touching sincerity. The concluding scene on the beach in Normandy retains the film's minimalist design and rewards viewers who remember Au hasard, Balthazar, but also suggests the formation of a new family and the redeeming power of love.

One of cinema's last great modernists, Green here continues his typically rigorous compositional schema and emphasis on bodies and rigid choreography rather than action or emoting. Meticulously framed, starkly lit, and almost uniformly static, his compositions (care of cinematographer Raphaël O'Byrne) often betray a dramaturgical depth resembling the Baroque period paintings seen throughout the film.