Suppose God was not good, but evil. Suppose he spent his days inventing laws to make our lives difficult and miserable. Laws like: 'The queue next to yours will always go faster'. Or: 'A slice of bread will always fall to the floor with the buttered side down'. Suppose he lived in a filthy apartment, drank lots of beer and snorted during his sleep. This is the blasphemous assumption 'Le tout nouveau testament' is based on. This extremely imaginative film turns the Bible inside out and puts it upside down. God is married to a dim-witted goddess, and has a young daughter who decides to expand the number of apostles from twelve to eighteen, because that is the number of players in a baseball game.
During the film, she finds six extra apostles, each of whom has some peculiarity. One is extremely beautiful but has only one arm, another one is sex obsessed since his early childhood, and one (played by Catherine Deneuve) is trading in her husband for a gorilla from the zoo. There are clearly no taboos for director Jaco Van Dormael.
His style of film making is related to that of Wes Anderson or Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Van Dormael is not concerned about reality, but creates a sort of magical world where anything is possible. He fills this world to the rim with visual gags and cinematographic pleasantries.
The problem I had with the film is that the fun and the jokes, as imaginative and creative as they are, become a bit tiresome after you realize the story behind it all is really very thin. In Wes Anderson's films, every funny element has a purpose and is part of a bigger picture. In Van Dormael's films, the point of the jokes is frequently lost. Just like in his other film 'Mr Nobody', this movie suffers from a multitude of ideas and a lack of focus. Some ideas are wonderfully poetic (being able to change the colour and pattern of the sky like a computer screen), but some are just easy slapstick (God falling into a canal because he's not able to walk on water like his daughter).
The lack of a good story becomes clear at the ending. It seems as if Van Dormael didn't know what to do after the six extra apostles have been found. The result is a bizarre scene, which is contrary to some earlier developments.
My assessment of this film is mixed: it contains some highly creative film making, which is a joy to watch, but too frequently the creativity spins out of control.
During the film, she finds six extra apostles, each of whom has some peculiarity. One is extremely beautiful but has only one arm, another one is sex obsessed since his early childhood, and one (played by Catherine Deneuve) is trading in her husband for a gorilla from the zoo. There are clearly no taboos for director Jaco Van Dormael.
His style of film making is related to that of Wes Anderson or Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Van Dormael is not concerned about reality, but creates a sort of magical world where anything is possible. He fills this world to the rim with visual gags and cinematographic pleasantries.
The problem I had with the film is that the fun and the jokes, as imaginative and creative as they are, become a bit tiresome after you realize the story behind it all is really very thin. In Wes Anderson's films, every funny element has a purpose and is part of a bigger picture. In Van Dormael's films, the point of the jokes is frequently lost. Just like in his other film 'Mr Nobody', this movie suffers from a multitude of ideas and a lack of focus. Some ideas are wonderfully poetic (being able to change the colour and pattern of the sky like a computer screen), but some are just easy slapstick (God falling into a canal because he's not able to walk on water like his daughter).
The lack of a good story becomes clear at the ending. It seems as if Van Dormael didn't know what to do after the six extra apostles have been found. The result is a bizarre scene, which is contrary to some earlier developments.
My assessment of this film is mixed: it contains some highly creative film making, which is a joy to watch, but too frequently the creativity spins out of control.