The Brand New Testament

Even more explicitly than Howard Hawks’s Red River, The Brand New Testament replays the transition from the harsh vengeful god of the Old Testament to the loving forgiving deity of the New. Where the John Wayne authority gives way to the sensitive Montgomery Clift in that Western, here the father/God’s cruelty and arbitrariness are rejected by the young daughter who revolts against him. 

Of course that’s how a genre can accommodate an archetypal myth. Here the genre is the family sit-com. JC, the father/God’s son, has escaped the family but hasn’t been able to improve the world sufficiently. Hence the contemporary setting, where God has preferred a murderous absurd world for his own amusement. 

The son having failed, now the feminine has to intervene. The young daughter Ea is the main heroine but she is abetted when her long suppressed mother — amid her domestic (i.e., cleaning) role — enables a reset that saves everyone and fills the heavens with flower wallpaper. Her projection of Interior Design is better than his ostensibly Intelligent.

In playing this theology against the context of a family sit-com (where the omniscient Father hardly knows best), the film’s essential assumption is that the first wave of Christianity has failed us. Jehovah’s wars and frustrations have thwarted the Son’s lessons of peace and harmony.  

Ea’s initial revolt is to release to the world everyone’s date of death. With that new and most forbidden knowledge, people lose their dependency upon God. No longer having to please him, they are prompted to redefine their lives and themselves. Each of Ea’s six new apostles represents a different form of self-discovery and humanizing. The last apostle actually converts from boy to girl.

The most evocative is the matured beauty Catherine Deneuve who escapes her cold tyrant husband first with a rent boy and then, more rewardingly, with a loving gorilla. In Ea’s new regime the most savage is turned into loving and the cold Christian “civility” is overthrown. Similarly another woman’s insentient prosthetic arm becomes her bond with her new lover, whom her love converts from killer. In a reversal of the Eden myth, another man is led out of his self-restriction in a city park to the antithetic freedom of the Arctic. No longer at two with nature, he’s led there by a flock of birds he can choreograph into visual patterns.  

The film’s first and essential joke is that in this theology Creation happened in modern Brussels. But far from a radical idea, that revives an essential tenet of Christianity: the eternal and pervasive presence of our divinity and our eternal battle with temptation and evil. 
     Further, as man made God in his own image (though he arrogantly pretends the reverse), there’s a certain logic in this God being a short-fused murderous and malicious abuser of women and children. That’s the force we see dominating our globe.