In each case Bresson’s protagonists respond to a special call which has no natural place in their environment. It is incredible that Joan the prisoner should act in such a manner before a panel of judges: nothing in the everyday has prepared the viewer for Joan’s spiritual, self-mortifying actions. Each protagonist struggles to free himself from his everyday environment, to find a proper metaphor for his passion. This struggle leads Michel to prison, Fontaine to freedom, and the priest and Joan to martyrdom.

The viewer finds himself in a dilemma: the environment suggests documentary realism, yet the central character suggests spiritual passion. This dilemma produces an emotional strain: the viewer wants to empathize with Joan (as he would for any innocent person in agony), yet the everyday structure warns him that his feelings will be of no avail. Bresson seems acutely aware of this: “It seems to me that the emotion here, in this trial (and in this film), should come not so much from the agony and death of Joan as from the strange air that we breathe while she talks of her Voices, or the crown of the angel, just as she would talk of one of us or this glass carafe.” This “strange air” is the product of disparity: spiritual density within a factual world creates a sense of emotional weight within an unfeeling environment. As before, disparity suggests the need, but not the place, for emotions.