The Fiction of an Alternative World in The Brand New Testament: The Fatherhood Crisis and Matriarchal Utopia

Religious films exemplify the colonization of cinema and offer a critical view of the holy figures. In movies that make the religious and divine into subjects of humor, an imagined belief-centered life is combined with a narrative in which the divine laws shaping everyday life and religious figures are satirized. The Brand New Testament (Le Tout Nouveau Testament, 2015), a rare example of religious comedy, is also a political comedy. It is a dystopian narrative criticizing the patriarchal world in which God, in human form, is a comic figure. From a feminist perspective, the study analyzes how the film, which imagines a matriarchal society, raises objections to the rule of masculine law through religious comedy. Approaches to religion in cinema are considered. The relationship between religion and humor is discussed, along with the historical background of a God figure in verbal and visual humor. The analysis is focused on the crisis of fatherhood, the film’s vision of a fatherless society, and the imagined matriarchal new world that is presented here as an alternative to the patriarchal world