Bruce Burgess, an English filmmaker with a resume that leans heavily to sensational TV documentaries, plunges headlong into the bloodline controversy, an alternate history of the origins of Catholicism.
Burgess' starting point is the Priory of Sion, a secret society supposedly devoted to preserving a secret that could rock the foundations of the Catholic Church: That Jesus survived the crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene, fathered children and died in France, where the Merovingian kings married his descendents. The result was the "sang real," a royal bloodline that is the real holy grail of myth. First put forth in the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, this version of Jesus' life and death was popularized by Dan Browne's novel The Da Vinci Code. Like countless others, Burgess finds himself drawn to Rennes-le-Chateau, a medieval town in the Languedoc region of southwestern France where, somewhere around 1890, Father Bergeron Sauniere is rumored to have uncovered both treasure and parchments pertaining to this controversy. The documents were supposedly suppressed by the Vatican. Burgess' investigation eventually leads him to a variety of odd characters who claim to know the truth, notable Nicolas Haywood, an English aristocrat who claims to be on intimate terms with the Priory's inner circle, and Ben Hammott, an amateur researcher who claims to have discovered a tomb in the Rennes-le-Chateau area whose contents may well be the "body of evidence" that will settle the bloodline controversy forever.
Despite Burgess' canny observation that Hammott's photographs of the mysterious tomb look too good to be true – like scenes from a movie – his own film raises the same doubts. Shot in the shadowy style of conspiracy thrillers and filled with bugged phones, scary phone messages, mysterious deaths, hidden clues and symbolic maps, it eventually comes off like a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Burgess and Hammott return to Rennes-le-Chateau, where Hammott finds previously unrecognized clues in Church of the Magdalene that lead to odd local landmarks and then a series of buried bottles containing parchments that provide further clues. The experts who weigh in on the artifacts Hammott and Burgess remove from the tomb seem sincere, and Burgess includes shots of some intriguing artifacts, including stained glass windows that appear to depicts Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdelene. But the film's piece de la resistance -- footage of what appears to be a mummified body Burgess and Hammott believe is Mary's – isn't enough to offset its overall air of breathless credulity. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
