The Son of Joseph

Mathieu Amalric is superb as the sullen, dissipated monster Vincent eventually confronts… There’s everything we’ve come to expect in a Green film – crystalline poetry, beguiling formal control, religious and spiritual matters treated seriously yet lightly, impassive acting, Baroque art and music – but with some new elements: a sex scene! A chase sequence! And this being a Nativity of sorts, of course there’s a donkey. Green is a master and this may be his most pleasurable film to date.

The film works through many tones (and puns), all inflected through an idiosyncratic style heavily influenced by late Bresson (The Devil, Probably comes to mind more than a few times), yielding a unified, joyous treatise on religion, family, art, and love that couldn’t be farther away from being a rarified exercise in formalism.

In Green’s hands, the old routine about telltale knickers is transformed into something preposterously stately—as if a low-brow sex gag had been sneaked into a performance of Racine… It’s a strange and wonderful film by a strange and wonderful writer-director.