Black Robe

For some reason, I was in New York when I saw Black Robe in a downtown theater.  This must have been in 1991.  It's odd what one remembers from a film and a film-going experience.  Over the years, I have always recalled a scene in the which the movie's protagonist, Father Laforgue, is lost in a forest.  He encounters some Huron Indians with whom he is traveling and they are amazed that he has managed to get lost:  "How can anyone be lost here?" a Huron asks.  "The woods are made for man," adding 'you must have forgotten to look at the trees."  In another scene, Father Laforgue encounters a priest who has been tortured by the Iroquois:  the man has had his ears burned off and his fingers amputated.  He tells Father Laforgue that he yearns to return to New France to work for the salvation of the people who mutilated him.  After the movie, I remember two older Jewish men debating the picture:  "It's no different with the Sioux," one of the men said, referencing Dances with Wolves:  "They would just as soon cut out your heart as look at you."  The other man shuddered melodramatically.  Curiously, the most flamboyant thing in Black Robe, a remarkable little sorcerer, a malign dwarf with an elegantly painted yellow and green face must have made no impression on me -- I didn't recall this peculiar character in the film at all.  This shows that what we remember, of course, is not necessarily the most important aspect of a film or work of art, but, more or less, random, I think.

Black Robe (1991) was directed by the Australian Bruce Beresford based on a distinguished novel by the Northern Irish writer Brian Moore.  It's an excellent film, a little pedantic in some ways, but exceptional in its portrait of ways of life that are now wholly alien to us.  The film operates at a double remove from our ordinary experience:  first, the picture involves a Jesuit priest, anxious for martyrdom, who will stop at nothing to convert the Indians in New France -- that is, the wild mountains and enormous waterways in 1634 in Quebec.  The priest's uncompromising faith is portrayed realistically -- this is not a man with whom we can really identify, a harsh zealot, even, a self-mortifying fanatic.  And the priest's antagonists, the Indians of the old Northeast forests are utterly baffling in their motivations and conduct -- one old priest says that he has lived with Indians for twenty years and still knows nothing about them.  The movie is convincing in showing us the "Other" in horrific detail -- Father Laforgue, by modern standards, is alarming and the Indians are worse.  Nonetheless, the film slowly builds a sort of rapport with these strange personages from ancient history and, at last, we have the illusion, at least, of believing that we have learned a little about these people.  This is an aspect of Beresford's obsessively detailed reconstruction of life on the Canadian frontier (when the continent was all frontier) and his careful observation of the byways and behavior of the Indians among whom the story takes place.  Everything looks real and there are no sequences that seem contrived or unlikely, although, of course, in a bow to audience expectations there are some highly suspenseful and exciting scenes.  My one criticism of the film is that it is bit too aggressive in establishing parallels between the Indians and the French -- for instance, we see the old Huron chief putting on his war paint cut in parallel with a French soldier donning his ceremonial armor and uniform; images of Catholic religious practices are compared with the Indians' rituals.  This is really a criticism of the way some sequences of the film are cut -- the subject matter seems generally impeccable and is handled with a degree of dispassionate, almost scientific objectivity, that is unusual in films.  In some ways, the movie resembles a documentary.  

Father Laforgue is dispatched upriver in canoes piloted by Huron Indians.  The objective, a bit likethe project in Apocalypse Now, is a remote mission, 1500 miles away, and, perhaps, either destroyed or abandoned.  Laforgue is accompanied by Daniel, a young French adventurer, and an Indian family led by Chomina, the group's guid and a distinguished leader,, together with his wife and daughter, Annuka.  There are a few other Huron warriors and some dogs that ride in the canoes as the group paddles through spectacular landscapes of huge granite cliffs, towering domes of rock, placid lakes rimmed by a mountains in their autumnal glory, and terrifying waterfalls and rapids.  (Beresford understands that the film is a variant on a Western and that movies of this sort require sequences showing the protagonists as tiny figures dwarfed by an immense, beautiful and deadly wilderness - this is surely one of the most visually impressive and beautiful films ever made and, also, very effective in showing the vicissitudes of the weather; the movie ends with bleak wintry landscapes, a sort of embodiment of despair.  

Along the way, the Indians begin to despise Black Robe as they call Laforgue and plot to kill him.  Annuka is involved in a love affair with Daniel -- Black Robe is appalled by the Indians' apparent promiscuity and willingness to have sex with others watching.  The Huron engage a vicious Medicine Man, a nasty little dwarf, to exorcise Laforgue.  The dwarf spends his time howling at the Priest and shaking a rattle in his face.  In one scene, we see the dwarf riding in a canoe facing the poor Black Robe and bellowing at him as the other Indians paddle strenuously.  (In one striking image, one of Hurons lugs the dwarf up a steep icy hill, carrying him on his shoulders.)  The dwarf proclaims that he is not human but a spirit and counsels the Indians to abandon the priest.  Chomina is troubled by visions in which he sees a strange rock-girt island, a skull on a pole, and a weird-looking pale woman with long white hair, a She-Manitou that signifies death.  The Indians believe that dreams are prophetic and that they are more real than the tangible landscapes and people whom we encounter.  Ultimately, Black Robe is abandoned.  But when a Iroquois war party appear, the Hurons fight them and, after a gory skirmish, Chomina and his two daughters, together with Daniel and Laforgue are taken prisoner.  The Iroquois are horrifying, plotting gruesome torture for their captives.  They live in one of moviedoms great sets, a sort of wicker village made from interwoven twigs and vines, everything shuddering with impact of the frigid winter winds.  The Iroquois cut off Laforgue's finger using a a cowrie shell (with which they intend to skin their victims alive on the morrow).  Chomina's wife has been killed in the fight with the Iroquois and the Indians execute his little daughter by cutting her throat in front of him -- everyone accepts this stoically; it's just the way things are done.  Annuka has sex with a guard and gets him to cut her free.  She kills the guard and with Chomina, Daniel, and Laforgue escapes into the wintry wilderness.  Chomina is badly hurt -- it seems he has a collapsed lung from having to run the gauntlet of Iroquois armed with hammer-like stone clubs, another gruesome and protracted sequence in the film.  During the escape, Chomina sees a peculiar rocky island in the big river and knows that this is where he will die.  Laforgue tries to baptize him, but Chomina refuses -- "why would I want to go to a place where I will not see my woman and daughter?" he asks, the pale wraith of the She-Manitou hovering nearby.  Daniel and Annuka leave Laforgue again and he makes his way alone to the Huron Mission.  A fever has killed most of the Indians and they blame the priests for the contagion -- one of them has been hacked to death and his frozen corpse lies in the chapel.  The other priest is dying.  The surviving Huron conspire to kill the remaining French priest -- a warrior says that if the Huron adopt Christianity, they can no longer be fierce and, without being fierce, the Iroquois will slaughter them.  The dying priest asks Laforgue if he "loves" the Indians -- we see a montage of their faces including the terrifying Iroquois war chief and the malign dwarf.  Laforgue says that he loves the Indians and will work for their salvation.  At the end of the film, the Indians gather for the "water cure", thinking that Baptism will save them from the contagion -- they are obviously seeking Baptism not because they have been converted but out of blind superstition.  Laforgue baptizes them, George Delarue's score swells and we hear a choir singing in Latin, and, outside the rude chapel, the sun emerges from the clouds (this is a very cloudy and overcast picture) and, for a moment, blazes in a gold nimbus around the cross.  But this is just a set up for a sucker punch.  As we see the sun shining on the Mission, a title tells us that the Huron converted, were butchered by the Iroquois, that the Mission failed and, a few years, later the Jesuits returned to France.  (The ending is so bleak that it caused Roger Ebert to denounce the picture as too relentless grim to be watchable.)

The movie is cold and disturbing.  It is conventionally made and has a few too many close-ups for my taste.  But one can not gainsay it's brilliance and the script, by Moore, is astonishing.