Joan Osborne’s 1990s hit ‘One of Us’ (‘What if God were one of us/Just a slob like one of us?’) gets its answer in this wacky extravaganza co-written and directed by Jaco Van Dormael. A slob is exactly what God (Benoît Poelvoorde) is, sitting in a high-rise in Brussels wearing a ratty dressing-gown and swigging beer as he first creates the world, and then (after a number of false starts with giraffes and ostriches) mankind which – in chapters headed ‘Genesis’ and ‘Exodus’ – God proceeds to torment, killing his creations off via plane and train crashes.
Looking on, appalled, as God moves in his mysterious but always mean and scuzzy ways are his downtrodden wife (Yolande Moreau) and rebellious daughter Ea (Pili Groyne). His son ‘JC’ has already escaped the family home, been crucified and returned as a small talking statue sitting on top of Ea’s wardrobe. God, still furious at being betrayed, refuses to let Ea sit at his right hand at breakfast; Ea responds by demonstrating signs of her own free will, magically moving a glass of milk across the table.
Egged on by JC, Ea makes her escape in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH fashion by climbing into a washing machine in the laundry room and emerging after crawling through a long tube in a laundrette in downtown Brussels. Before leaving, Ea has hacked into God’s computer and let the world’s population know the exact time and date of their death via text messages (aka ‘DeathLeaks’) on their mobiles.
Ea’s mission is to find six more apostles to complete the picture of the Last Supper that hangs on the wall at home: the original twelve were arbitrarily chosen as the number of players in an ice hockey team (when he’s not creating petty annoyances for humanity to tolerate, such as dropped bread and jam always landing jam side down and the next supermarket queue always moving faster, God spends his time watching sport on TV). God’s wife prefers baseball, hence the logical (sic) move to bump the number of apostles up to eighteen.
…audiences may find THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT charming and irritating in equal measure…
From the vast filing cabinets in God’s study Ea has chosen a random and dysfunctional half-dozen who we meet as they come to terms with their imminent deaths (these chapters are punctuated by a kid called Kevin who, on discovering that he has many years still to live, brazenly chooses ways to die that don’t in fact kill him: jumping off ledges, out of planes, etc). Each apostle resolves to change their lives in the time left to them: they include a woman with a prosthetic arm, disfigured since a childhood accident; a lonely porn addict; a would-be assassin now free to pick targets off with a rifle; a boy desperate to become a girl; and most bizarre of all, in a film stocked with arresting images, Catherine Deneuve making up for years of loveless marriage by starting a relationship with a gorilla.
In each of these souls, Ea literally hears a piece of music unique to them – an ethereal symbol of their aspirations to break free: music in complete contrast to the comedy brass surrounding God’s pursuit of Ea down the washing-machine tube, resulting in slapstick humiliations (as in Preston Sturges’s SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS) that God has only brought on himself. Meanwhile, back in the high-rise, God’s wife is discovering powers of her own via the vacuum cleaner and God’s unplugged computer.
Unlike God, Jaco Van Dormael is in complete control of the material and personnel at his disposal, and the design of the film and the deadpan performances of the cast are all of a piece, each surreal touch earning its place, every satirical blasphemy paid off. Almost two hours of full-on whimsy is hard to pull off, though, and audiences may find THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT charming and irritating in equal measure: not unlike the life itself that a different God might have mapped out for us.
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