The Brand New Testament is a film with the simple but, no doubt, rather blasphemous premise that God is a right dick and lives in Brussels with his wife and daughter. The said daughter, Ea (the excellent young Pili Groyne), decides that her father - to meet his own childish and mischievous pleasure needs - is treating his creations unnecessarily badly. She, therefore, rebels and sets out to find six apostles, in the spirit of her late brother, JC.
It is a great idea overall, full of great ideas within it, but something does not quite gel. Much of God’s behaviour is very funny; his rules of annoyance (bread and jam landing on the jam side, the queue you’re not in moving quicker, the phone ringing as soon as you get in the bath, etcetera) and his disdain for his first born, Jesus, produce some of the best moments. The film employs the same playful, surreal humour of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s work, but it does sometimes fall a little short of the mark and it rarely mixes well with the more serious moments.
There are big themes here, as one may expect within a film about creation and God – the difference between the old and new testaments are quite clearly shown in the fact that God is mean, jealous, controlling, and batshit crazy, but his children are much more progressive and nice. The tug of war between free will and fate is also very prevalent – when Ea releases every human’s death date, it takes the control from God, as it does with the individual human in some ways, but, for the latter, it does bring a sense of freedom and relief with it too.
There is a lot of fun to be had with The Brand New Testament – it is funny and sweet and interesting – but the sum of its parts could certainly have been more coherent and would have made the difference between a verdict of pretty good, which it was, and top notch, which it was not.
The Brand New Testament will be showing at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 28 April 2016.
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