Mundruczo has strong theatrical roots and Johanna, like most of his works, is closer to theater, than film - in fact, to classical opera. The libretto has been written by Janos Terey, a Hungarian poet and writer and it just further clarifies the fact that Johanna is an opera adopted to the big screen.
It may or may not work very well, but to treat it as a conventional movie may not be the best approach - the whole set is indeed very surreal: Johanna, a young morphine addict ends up in a dark and moody hospital, where a young doctor falls in love with her and convinces the rest of the doctors to give her a chance and let her work at the hospital as a nurse. The woman starts to treat the terminally ill men in an unusual manner which is not received well by the doctors ending the whole situation in the sacrifice of Johanna (with a chorus reciting the moral of the story).
The set is a real hospital, called the "Hospital in the Rock" and was built under the Buda castle in the thirties - it is terrifying and marvelous in the same time and can work very well as an opera set (also note that Terey and Mundruczo already used it for theatrical plays before). Johanna as a character is a profane saint: what she does is obscene, but does work - curing with sexuality, like in Breaking the Waves (Trier). The camera work and the degradation of the film material is also similar to Trier's (think of Medeia for example), and has similar conclusions: both saints are discarded while their powers defeat rationality.
In an age of technology the deeply maternal and spiritual rituals are banished from our life, the fall of Johanna is inevitable from the very moment she decides to stay among the terminally ill. The paternalistic hospital, with all the male patients (who will not save the girl in the end) and the male doctors aided by their superiority and academic knowledge destroy the unknown female power: they kill her, discard her and burn her, banishing her from this world. Unlike with Trier, no church bells this time, but the similarity is still very clear.
It may or may not work very well, but to treat it as a conventional movie may not be the best approach - the whole set is indeed very surreal: Johanna, a young morphine addict ends up in a dark and moody hospital, where a young doctor falls in love with her and convinces the rest of the doctors to give her a chance and let her work at the hospital as a nurse. The woman starts to treat the terminally ill men in an unusual manner which is not received well by the doctors ending the whole situation in the sacrifice of Johanna (with a chorus reciting the moral of the story).
The set is a real hospital, called the "Hospital in the Rock" and was built under the Buda castle in the thirties - it is terrifying and marvelous in the same time and can work very well as an opera set (also note that Terey and Mundruczo already used it for theatrical plays before). Johanna as a character is a profane saint: what she does is obscene, but does work - curing with sexuality, like in Breaking the Waves (Trier). The camera work and the degradation of the film material is also similar to Trier's (think of Medeia for example), and has similar conclusions: both saints are discarded while their powers defeat rationality.
In an age of technology the deeply maternal and spiritual rituals are banished from our life, the fall of Johanna is inevitable from the very moment she decides to stay among the terminally ill. The paternalistic hospital, with all the male patients (who will not save the girl in the end) and the male doctors aided by their superiority and academic knowledge destroy the unknown female power: they kill her, discard her and burn her, banishing her from this world. Unlike with Trier, no church bells this time, but the similarity is still very clear.