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"I knew then I was in the presence of a certifiable madman," the cameraman later recalled.

Perhaps, but with "The Messenger: Joan of Arc," Besson has turned France's most revered heroine into a box-office hit and his most provocative film to date. Instead of a marauding Bruce Willis flying taxis in the 1997 "The Fifth Element" or the murderous government assassin of "La Femme Nikita," the 40-year-old French director now plunges into near-metaphysical speculations about war, the church and the tricky delusions of seemingly divine revelations.

This being Besson, however, the film is not without its fair share of headless necks gushing blood and other indelible glories of medieval battle. In one arresting sequence, Joan, played by Besson's ex-wife, Milla Jovovich, is shot in the chest with an arrow and falls straight backward off a siege ladder like a warring angel, dropping 30 feet into the arms of her soldiers on the ground below.

The origins of Besson's Joan have been no less bloody, with the secretive director coming under fire for plagiarism, selling out France's hallowed icon by hiring Hollywood stars, even shooting in English. Like it or not, Besson has a knack for fanning the flames swirling around his own martyr's pyre.

Kathryn Bigelow, the action director of "Strange Days" and "Blue Steel," currently has a lawsuit pending in Los Angeles Superior Court charging that Besson stole her script. Originally executive producer on Bigelow's 10-year project "Company of Angels," Besson unceremoniously pulled out when Bigelow insisted on casting Claire Danes, not Jovovich, as Joan. He took the financing with him and Bigelow's project collapsed. Shortly afterward, Besson announced his own Joan, with Jovovich in the lead role. The case is expected to drag on into the next millennium.

Besson's film is only the latest of at least 50 films about the Maid of Orléans made in the past 100 years, a regiment that includes Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg and Sandrine Bonnaire as Joan. For sheer psychological power, Danish director Carl Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc," with the mournful Renée Falconetti as the saint, tops them all, even though it was made in 1928 without sound, color or gory battle scenes.

When a pair of interviewers from the French weekly "L'Express" asked if he felt intimidated by so many precursors, Besson shot back, "Do you really think Modigliani was intimidated by Picasso just because both of them painted nudes?"

No one would confuse Besson with Modigliani or Picasso. Despite the overwhelmingly respectful reviews for "The Messenger," which opened last week in France, local critics have generally regarded Besson as a Hollywood sell-out, churning out the sci-fi special-effects workout "The Fifth Element" to beat the Americans at their own game.

With "The Messenger," the director thought he was doing the French a favor, bringing the nationalist icon home where she belongs. Another projected film with Mira Sorvino cast as Joan (to be directed by Ron Maxwell, the director of Turner Pictures' miniseries, "Gettysburg") has temporarily given way in the face of Besson's film with Sony and French distributor Gaumont. Still another American Joan of Arc project, a TV movie with Leelee Sobieski as Joan, withstood the Besson bulldozer, airing in May on CBS.

"I was furious that the Americans, who have massacred European subjects more often than not, had their eyes again on Joan of Arc," Besson told Le Monde's Jean-Michel Frodon. "Originally, I never dreamed of directing the film myself; I only wanted a French director to do it."

Next page | Gallic pride apparently doesn't apply to casting