“To know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti, a living mask of plasticity molded to the inner world of a young Joan, is to know the private history of a spiritual crisis. Falconetti wrings every last nuance and syllable out of her facial vocabulary, in taking the viewer through the serrated moodscape of an endangered martyr. There is the glazed vacancy, that faraway within, implying Joan’s intimate consort with angels or the otherworldly. The blinkless moonshot eyes, teetering on the brink of grave absolution. Lids drawn over those eyes, like a sluggish cortege or fated blinds. Falconetti’s amorphic palette of expressions operates with a stringent economy that both speaks and mutes volumes. In one scene, when one of Joan’s Inquisitors demands to know who taught her the Our Father prayer, Joan, with a tear carving a glisten down her cheek, answers—My mother.
Falconetti’s face, in that moment, is an open invitation to enter the mortal suffering of a young girl who dearly misses her mother, her home, her simple life.”

Excerpt from my novel, The Last Furies.

Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1928 silent film masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, is one of the key elements in the Furies intersecting narrative.

Print, digital and audio editions of The Last Furies now available through Lost Telegram Press.