Here is a sprightly, glib but toothless and rather pointless religious comedy from Belgium in a vaguely Gilliamesque vein, jammed with quickfire novelistic voiceovers and backstory thumbnail sketches of the kind I associate with commercial French movies such as Amélie.
The Brand New Testament imagines the Judeo-Christian God alive and well, and he’s a bad-tempered, boozy slob living in a tatty flat with his unhappy wife and sullen 11-year-old daughter – in Brussels, a bad place to be reminded, incidentally, that satirists taunting religion tend to steer well clear of Islam.
Benoît Poelvoorde is God, Yolande Moreau is his wife, and Pili Groyne is daughter Ea (God’s son, incidentally, has long since walked out on the family unit). Ea defies her dad by sabotaging the ancient 80s-vintage computer on which he devises all his pointlessly cruel earthquakes etc and sets up on her own. She creates six personal apostles by telling them the time and date of their death: this has the effect of focusing their minds on what they really want to do and be – mostly centred on love and sex – and delivers them into a state of grace. Catherine Deneuve plays one of these apostles; she’s now in an ecstatic Max-Mon-Amour-type relationship with a gorilla. Some nice moments, but it doesn’t seriously – or funnily – engage with the idea of religion.
