Joan’s Messengers

There is a striking photograph of Milla Jovovich taken by Italian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi that the actress and cover girl brought home one day to show her husband, French film director Luc Besson.

It was, she recalls, the portrait of this creature, neither woman nor man, with Medusa-like curls snaking apart and stiff, powdered hair going this way and that, and crazy, sepia-toned, “Blade Runner”-type makeup filled with shadows and strange expression.

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if somebody represented Joan of Arc like that?” the tall, cat-eyed Jovovich asked her bearded mate.

Soon, they were tossing out various ideas and images about France’s famous teenage warrior-saint, discussions that would eventually lead to Besson’s new film, “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc,” which stars Jovovich in the title role.

Opening in the U.S. on Friday, the $60-million-plus movie from Columbia Pictures and French film company Gaumont co-stars Dustin Hoffman as Joan’s conscience, John Malkovich as King Charles VII and Faye Dunaway as Yolande d’Aragon, Charles’ shrewd mother-in-law.

As befitting Hollywood, the union of Luc and Milla would not outlast the film’s post-production process. In April, the 23-year-old actress and the 40-year-old director announced they had separated, although they are not divorced.

But their collaboration has led to a searing and controversial take on one of history’s most puzzling heroines.

Filled with bizarre, dreamlike sequences, gory battles and palace intrigue, “The Messenger” is an unorthodox look at Joan as a human being wrestling with doubts.

“Who are you that makes you think you can know the difference between good and evil? Are you God?” Hoffman asks Jovovich as Joan awaits her fate in a prison cell. “How can you possibly imagine that God, the creator, the source of all life, could possibly need you?”

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Marketing “The Messenger” to a mass American audience is a daunting task for Columbia.

“It’s a tough movie to sell,” said one Hollywood observer. “I don’t know many people who are interested in Joan of Arc. Another problem is, in the movie ‘Braveheart,’ you had Mel Gibson as an action hero. In this movie, you have a woman as an action hero. It’s tough. Not that you can’t do it. Sigourney Weaver was great in ‘Alien.’ ”

Filmmakers have long had a fascination with Joan of Arc, for her story is compelling on almost any level.

Convinced she was acting under divine guidance, this peasant farmer’s daughter led the French army to a monumental victory over the English at Orleans in the 15th century, only to be betrayed by her king, captured by her enemies, declared a witch and burned alive at the stake at age 19. Pronounced innocent 25 years later, she was canonized a saint by the Roman Catholic Church as recently as 1920.

That Besson and Jovovich would team up to make a historical statement about Joan of Arc might cause some to pause.

Dubbed the French Spielberg because his box-office success has not always translated into critical acclaim, Besson is often at odds with his country’s film establishment. “They want to protect themselves when they shouldn’t,” he says. “They should just be more free to do what they like.”

Critics also take potshots at his films, complaining, for instance, that “The Big Blue” was a “sad spectacle”; “La Femme Nikita” was about “killer bimbos”; “The Professional” could best be summed up as “a hit man meets Lolita”; or the blockbuster sci-fi thriller “The Fifth Element,” starring Bruce Willis, was simply “inane” and “cheesy.”

Then there’s Jovovich. The Ukrainian-born, California-raised L’Oreal model with the million-dollar cheekbones has a curious acting resume that includes “Return to the Blue Lagoon,” “Chaplin,” “Dazed and Confused” and “He Got Game.” Only when she appeared as the orange-haired, bioengineered Leeloo in Besson’s “The Fifth Element” did Hollywood really begin to take notice of her acting skills.

Branded a “wild child” in the press, Jovovich eloped to Las Vegas at 16 with a 21-year-old actor, only to see the marriage annulled two months later. In December 1997, she married Besson, but the couple separated after only 16 months. “I grew up fast and went through things faster and ended things faster,” she says. “But through all that, I tried really hard to get where I am at this point.”

While some might consider leggy, exotic-looking Jovovich a quirky choice to star as France’s national heroine, Besson had no doubts she could rise to the challenge.

“I knew she was perfect for it,” the director said in fractured English as he relaxed recently over a plate of fruit at the commissary at Sony Pictures Entertainment in Culver City.

‘She Has the Same Kind of Passion and Excess’

“Since I know her, she has the same kind of passion and excess [as Joan] and, you know, she can laugh and she can cry two seconds afterwards,” he added. “She can cry for an ant on the street. She has, like, no skin,” he adds, picking at his forearm. “She feels everything. Even the wind can make her cry. You know? So, in this sense, she is really a part of Joan, I think.”

With the exception of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece, “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Besson said he was dissatisfied with how filmmakers have depicted Joan, including the recent CBS miniseries “Joan of Arc” starring Leelee Sobieski.

Besson believes that even though Joan did great things, she must have had some doubts because of the death and destruction left in her wake.

“They always start with her as a saint,” Besson complained. “For me, she became a saint at the end [of her life] because she has to admit, ‘I was wrong.’ By accepting it, that is the only way she can purify herself.”

Jovovich echoed Besson in a separate interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, where she pointed out that “The Messenger” attempts to place Joan in a human context.

“She had her good points and her bad points,” the actress explained. “I think nobody in the past has dwelt on the strange side of the fable and the myth because she is a saint, but she is responsible for death. So, what about that? What about that dark pocket that nobody has really reached into?”

“The Messenger” began filming in June 1998 in the Czech Republic near a city named Bruntal, about 120 miles east of Prague, and later moved to France in the chateau country of the Loire Valley, Normandy, Picardie, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine.

The script’s demands on Jovovich were particularly daunting. Not only did she have to learn how to mount and dismount horses wearing 50 pounds of armor, but she also had to give off a constant flow of intensity, whether yelling orders to her troops or whispering secrets in the king’s ear.

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While Malkovich and Dunaway were always his first choices for the roles of Charles and Yolande, Besson said Hoffman was a late and key addition to the cast.

Dressed in a monk’s hood and cloak, Hoffman plays Joan’s conscience, incessantly questioning her about her visions, such as the strange winds she claims to have seen or the sword she said miraculously appeared at her side while playing in a field.

“You mean, God said, ‘I need you, Joan?’ ” he asks her.

“No, but he sent me signs,” she replies.

“Signs? What signs?”

“The wind. . . . The wind!”

“Wind?”

“And the clouds! The rain!”

“Rain and clouds?”

”. . . The sword! The sword lying in the field! That was a sign!”

“No, that was a sword lying in a field.”

Besson admits that he has taken liberties with the historical record but defends his script thusly: “I’m not a historian looking for truth. I’m just an artist--I watch this part of the puzzle with this line beginning [here]. I see the line go here, and I figure the line goes here, and I try to have a picture of the whole puzzle which makes sense.”

While it will be interesting to see whether “The Messenger” finally gives Besson the critical acclaim that has generally eluded him, the film could also go a long way toward determining whether Hollywood views Jovovich as a serious actress.

“I don’t know what I could possibly do more to be taken seriously,” she says. “I’m not depending on this movie to do anything. I need to work and I always have to work. If this goes well, that will be amazing, but at this point, I don’t have any more hopes for this film than what I got from it already.”

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There is little question that Jovovich is now trying to cast off the “wild child” tag. At her interview, she arrived stylishly dressed in a wine-colored turtleneck and black skirt with matching shoes.

Polite and soft-spoken, she asked a visitor’s permission to smoke, snuffing out each cigarette in an ashtray and then quickly covering the smoke with a copy of TV Guide.

With a wispy voice that betrayed some nervousness, she talked candidly about her career, her Russian immigrant parents and even her unorthodox religious beliefs. The one topic she would not address in any detail was Besson.

At a recent press junket for “The essenger” held at the Four Seasons, sources say, Besson and Jovovich hugged in the hallway and talked quietly for a few minutes before going their separate ways.

“Luc and I love each other very much,” Jovovich explains softly. “He’s my best friend, and whatever we had that didn’t work out, we had much more things that did work out.”

Jovovich Looks to Life Beyond Modeling Career

When it comes to her career, she is more outspoken. In her interview, she made it clear she is tired of being typecast in misfit roles.

“There have been offers for things that are just the weirdest roles,” she said. “Psychos in mental institutions and, you know, strange killers. Everything psychotic, I’m offered it.”

While modeling has made her financially secure, Jovovich added, she knows that the fame and money that come with it can disappear in a camera bulb’s flash. As her mother, onetime Russian actress Galina Loginova, once told her, you can’t always rely on modeling “because it depends on the look of the moment, and you can’t take it too seriously.”

With her band, Plastic Has Memory, Jovovich has performed at such clubs as L.A.’s Viper Room and won critical praise for her first CD, “The Divine Comedy,” released by EMI Records.

As for her religious beliefs, Jovovich is quite frank. “I think that there is no God,” she said, although she noted, “I enjoy going to church because it’s nice to see a group of people being sweet to one another. . . .”

An avid devotee of the mystical writings of the late Carlos Castaneda, Jovovich holds unconventional views on death and the afterlife.

“I think personally that we can exchange our realities,” she explained. “I believe death is optional. We’re just not smart enough to understand how to die without dying, to be just walking spirits or souls. I think some people that you will never hear about have gone on to different dimensions and can still exist, and through the power of their minds that are so open, they didn’t need to die. They kind of disintegrated their matter and they can come together. I mean, it’s very science-fiction.”

Jovovich remains close to her parents, but she is still struggling emotionally from being separated for eight years from her father, Bogich Jovovich, who spent time in a U.S. prison in connection with a large health insurance fraud case.

“It’s one of the most painful things in my life and has been such a struggle in my life for so long, and it’s just finally over and it’s something we are still going through,” she said. “I adore my father. He’s the most wonderful man. . . . I wanted to see my dad, but he just wouldn’t let me come. He went through a really, really difficult time for a long time, and he got a lot of punishment for something that he didn’t deserve.”

Something with which Joan of Arc, no doubt, could identify.