Review: The Brand New Testament

The Brand New Testament (15)

Belgium/France/Luxembourg 2015  112 mins  Dir: Jaco Van Dormael  Starring: Pili Groyne, Benoît Poelvoorde, Catherine Deneuve, François Damiens, Yolande Moreau, Laura Verlinden

Meet God (Poelvoorde). He’s an utter bastard. This isn’t my description but that of his long-suffering ten-year-old daughter, Ea (Groyne). Yup, God has a daughter. We mostly hear about her brother JC these days, but he only has a small role in this story. Our slovenly, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, potty-mouthed and unshaven deity lives in a three-bedroom Brussels apartment with his mumsy doormat of a spouse (Moreau) and little Ea. His hobby is tormenting mankind just as a small boy might torture a colony of ants. God cackles away gleefully as he sits at his computer in his filthy dressing gown, conjuring up disasters and inventing Laws of Universal Annoyance. When Ea can take it no longer, she asks JC for advice. He suggests recruiting six new apostles, bringing the total up to enough to form a baseball team. So when God passes out drunkenly in front of the telly, she sneaks into his office and sends everyone on earth a text message revealing the exact date and time of their death. She then scarpers through a portal in the back of the washing machine and sets about locating a sextet for her brand new testament.

You’d have to be an especially pious god-botherer to be offended by Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael’s most enjoyable and playful film since that early ’90s arthouse staple Toto the Hero. But then, as John Cleese was once quoted as saying, some people deserve to be offended. Indeed, there’s a certain Python-esque humour at play here, which also means that those who are hoping for a serious critique of religion should probably look elsewhere. Man Bites Dog star Benoît Poelvoorde makes a terrific foul-tempered, self-regarding tyrant of a vengeful Almighty (“Praise be to me!”), but is frequently upstaged by confident young Pili Groyne as his sweet, inquisitive daughter. Ea has some supernatural talents of her own, including the ability to hear people’s ‘inner music’ and shape their dreams.

The witty script has much fun with the notion of fate vs free will, refusing to get stuck in the theological quagmire by revealing that there’s no Heaven or Hell – once your number’s up, that’s your lot. And knowing exactly when that’s going to happen releases mankind from fear of God, much to his displeasure, as they figure out what to do with their remaining allotted span. A running joke has a bloke with more than 60 years left on the clock taking ever more reckless risks, confident in the knowledge that he’ll somehow survive.

Ea’s motley crew of disciples are each encouraged to tell their own stories to the bum she’s recruited to jot them down. These are variously funny, touching, startling and sad, ranging from a little boy who wants to be a girl to a sex maniac who falls for a Ms. Malaprop; a bloke who reckons he might as well shoot people, on the logical grounds that if he kills them it won’t be his fault; and a wealthy woman (veteran Catherine Deneuve) stuck in a loveless marriage, who takes the opportunity to bed a circus gorilla, Max Mon Amour style. Van Dormael, meanwhile, adds just enough grit to the whimsy to avoid his briskly paced, slickly edited divine comedy taking a twee turn for the Gondry-esque. He also has the good sense to keep Poelvoorde’s God in the frame by sending him off in hot pursuit of his errant daughter, only to find he has become the agent of his own misfortune.