Black Robe

Starring:Lothaire Bluteau, Aden Young, Sandrine Holt, August Schellenberg, Tantoo Cardinal, Billy Two Rivers, Lawrence Bayne, Harrison Liu, Wesley Cote, Frank Wilson (II), FranÃ§ois TassÃ©, Jean Brousseau, Yvan Labelle, Raoul Trujillo, James Bobbish, Denis Lacroix, Gilles Plante, Gordon Tootoosis, Marthe Turgeon, Claude PrÃ©fontaine
Director: Bruce Beresford
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

Forget about Kevin Costner's sun-kissed, water-colored, Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves. Black Robe, which was directed by Bruce Beresford, a director who gave the world the finest film of the early '80s Australian new wave, Breaker Morant, and who continually collides cultures and ethnicity in his films (Mister Johnson, Driving Miss Daisy), matches and surpasses the Costner epic as an expertly crafted, brutal saga of redemption and salvation. In 1634 a young French Jesuit missionary is assigned to trek 1,500 miles through the New France wilderness to a mission settled in Huron Indian country. Black Robe chronicles the journey of Father Laforgue (Lothaire Blutheau) as he leaves his Jesuit brothers and, with the aid of a young translator and guide, Daniel (Aden Young), and eight canoes of Algonquin Indians, moves into the uncompromising Canadian northern territory on a die-hard mission to convert the natives. Mixing elements of Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans and Roland Joffé's The Mission, Beresford offers a restless tale of Laforgue's conflicted faith juxtaposed against the sublime spiritual harmony with the land that the Huron and Algonquin already hold. Black Robe dances to its own drummer and is tuned into the precarious balance between nature's mystery and spirit and the strident, unyielding religious ethic. The cinematography by Peter James is relentlessly cruel and bleak, but it absolutely conveys the obstacles that face the idealistic and blind young priest, who by the end, has faced his own awakening. The film also features one of the late, great composer Georges Delerue's most noble scores. --Paula Nechak

Description

From acclaimed director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies) and adapted by screenwriter Brian Moore from his novel of the same name, Black Robe is "amazing an adventure film that is as intelligent as it is enthralling" (US)! French Jesuit missionary Father Laforgue travels to the magnificently austere Canadian wilderness to save the souls of a "savage and godless" peoplethe native tribes of the Huron and Algonquin. But the natives, who have their own spiritual value system that differs drastically from Christianity, are immediately suspicious, resentful and openly hostile toward the intrusive "Black Robe." And when Laforgue hires a reluctant group of Algonquin to escort him on a harrowing 1500-mile journey up the broad and sinuous St. Lawrence River, a devastating chain of events not only causes him to question his deeply held beliefs but also forever changes the course of history for the natives' way of life.

Customer Reviews:

WOW.......2007-02-06

The violation of true relationships in this film is astounding. It demonstrates the sheer violence that can be perpetrated against a people group that you feel has no value as human beings. Sometimes we get so caught up in our "mission" that we forget that we are all made in God's image and we all have value in God's sight. To ignore the incarnationality of Jesus within each one of us is to deny the great gospel message of Christianity. This film shows how a mission without regard for culture can result in devastation beyond all imagination. I highly recommend this film.

The Forgotten Art Of Trusting A Film To Truly TELL A Story.......2007-01-26

Black Robe is a lush, incredibly deep, strikingly emotive motion picture, that tells the story of a young Jesuit priest's journey across the dense wilderness of seventeenth-century Quebec, undertaken while he simultaneously experiences a transformative test of his commitment to the stark way of life he has chosen. Which holds the greatest desire for him, a beckoning existence of ease and comfort amid relatives back in France; the possibility of earthly love; or service to God, that almost certainly includes a violent martyrdom?

Guided by his nation's Algonquin allies, the determined, idealistic young man of a privileged caste seeks to take up his assignment at a mission on the edge of "New France's" colonial frontier. As this decidedly quiet and cerebral epic unfolds, a journey of spiritual evolution takes this priest and his small band through numerous personal tests and into the face of many dangers, not merely from the unwelcoming savagery of the landscape itself, but from hostile aboriginals who welcome neither the Algonquians nor the European intruder into their homeland. What begins amid the opulence of Bourbon France becomes bluntly visceral with unsparing depictions of torture, bloodlust, rape, and death, and yet the way in which this tale is left to carry itself toward its most unforeseen climax is absolutely courageous.

There are too many noteworthy performances to list here, and any written description of the scenery within this film would fall flat. With its countless tiny moments that contrast cultures (Algonquians thinking the Frenchmen's' mechanical clock was somehow their king, since they lived by its motions) for the alternating bravery, sadism, devotions and loyalty of those characters within it, for its terrific story, and for its end to end flawless quality, I truly think Black Robe is among the greatest films shot in the 1990's, and might just be at the top of its particular genre.

Black Robe.......2007-01-10

Definitely rated R but very interesting and disturbing in the white man's treatment of Indians.

Okay, not a barn burner though.......2006-11-02

Interesting movie, little short on the story line, some of the actors were not as believable as they could have been (the native americans), the romantic scenes were over emphasized, ...I love the period in history, is the only reason I remotely like the movie.

New France, now seemingly forgotten.......2006-09-07

This movie seems to aim at being a serious historical comment and an action-adventure movie. It is hard to achieve both aims in the same movie. Life has never been cram-packed with action and adventure even for Jesuit missionaries. Nevertheless, the movie may have the value of interesting some viewers in the historical subject of New France, which had a long life of about a century and a half but can be seen as one of history's big might-have-beens nevertheless.

The music is beautiful, and so is the scenery. Captions are provided for the natives as they speak their own languages. Everything said in English, however, we are supposed to imagine spoken in French, I assume. Why the French should not speak French, I do not know. The DVD provides French and Spanish captions, but not voice-overs.

The movie is rated R, probably for sex and violence. I counted three brief sex scenes. Whether the first two are dramatically justifiable depends mostly on the audience. We take in both scenes through the eyes of the missionary, and both communicate something offensive, and this seems to be their point. In the first, standards of privacy are at stake. In the second, standards of commitment, as it turns out. (Much gets said about the sacrament of baptism in this movie; notably little, in view of the plot, about the sacrament of matrimony.) The third is Hollywoodesque and unlikely to say the least. The movie is fiction, nowhere more than in that scene. But as for the violence, the movie is loosely based on a past reality; and the violence is, if anything, toned down from the historically documented violence and cruelty of that time, place, and people. This does not mean that it is easy to view or that everybody wants to see it. For first-hand historical accounts, see the Jesuit Relations, available on Amazon.

One theme of the movie is that we are all religious creatures in the sense that awareness of our mortality calls forth a response of some kind. The Catholic faith was the response of French Catholics and the response taught by the missionaries. The natives had their own accustomed response. But are all responses equally good and truthful? The movie could seem to say so, but the Catholic answer, both then and now, is a firm no. The movie does not have to be interpretted as affirming religious neutrality or agnosticism, but such an interpretation is easily possible.

One scene shows a penitential gesture on the part of the missionary. It is possible to view this sympathetically, but I fear that it makes him look like a nut, since it hard to see how he can blame himself at that point. Penitential practices were not uncommon and could go rather far, but I know of no good reason to think that Catholic missionaries were neurotic.

In another scene, the young Frenchman Daniel tells the missionary about the Algonquin concept of afterlife. The missionary calls it "childish." Daniel asks rhetorically whether it is harder to believe than that of sitting on clouds enjoying a beatific vision. End of conversation, in the movie. Daniel gets the last word on the subject, and it seems anti-Christian. But in fact, it is merely anti-Dante; and, even at that, Dante's poem and similar works of the European Christian imagination -- the best of them -- would have been poorly summarized or understood. Obviously, the Catholic Church did not prohibit such works, but also teaches, "Heaven is the end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, article 1024). If sitting on clouds would just bore Daniel, then it would not be heaven for him.

Another theme has to do with dreams, whether happy dreams or nightmares. See article 67 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church for a statement on private revelations, which says of them, in part, "It is not their role to improve or complete Christ's definitive Revelation." Chomina's dream does reveal a piece of the future, as it turns out, and such dreams do not occur only in fiction, but generally they are, properly, little more than curiosities. By themselves dreams usually do not reliably guide the dreamer, after waking. The obstacle of interpreting a dream is usually insurmountable, and bad interpretation makes for bad guidance. The missionary's remark about people who think that dreams are real and this world is an illusion has everything to do with the Christian faith, for it is terribly important that Jesus lived in this world for real, not in dreams or in movies -- those dreams enabled through Thomas Edison -- and that he rose from the dead for real. See 1 Corinthians 15: 12-19 for St. Paul's statement on the importance of Jesus's resurrection as real. The missionary would have realized that he was awake in the same real world as Jesus, just sixteeen hundred years later. The year was 1634.

The movie shows three Huron elders debating whether their tribe should accept Christianity from the Jesuit missionaries. They think that doing so might weaken their ability to defend themselves militarily. Then a note at the end of the movie says that the Huron were later "routed and killed by their Iroquois enemies." Without knowing more, the audience would thus be led to believe that the misgivings of the Huron elders were well founded, as though the missionaries had been too pacifistic; but this belief can be doubted. Historically, the missionaries opposed the common practice of torturing defenseless captives, but did not oppose effective defence. In fact, they would have reason to defend their own work with arms if necessary.

Some details in this movie dramatize historical conditions of some note. For example, the very brief scene of Daniel fumbling with his firearm, such as it is, is surely a comment on those extremely awkward and unreliable weapons; the bow was still far superior. The missionary's comment about brandy in the first scene is a comment on the practice of plying the natives with an addictive substance that their culture had no long experience with. The costumes and sets are, I assume, facsimiles of the real thing.

Viewers who do not already know might like to be told that one line in the movie, "For the greater glory of God," is, or used to be, the motto of the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus: "Ad majorem Dei gloriam."

Another line, a sweeping comment on European history, made by an older priest in France, says that the English and the Germans were uncivilized until "we" took our faith to them. If "we" means the Church, then the comment is right as a summary. If it means the French, then it is not quite right. The Chrisitanization of the English was undertaken by missionaries from Ireland and from the continent, not all of whom came from Gaul. The most renowned mission to the Germans was that of St. Boniface, an Englishman. But all of that pertains to late antiquity or the early middle ages, and the priest's line in the movie could actually have reflected views of Frenchmen by the early 1600s, whose grasp of European history might have been strongly influenced, and distorted, by the more recent part of it.

Joan of Arc is called "St. Joan." Her sainthood would have been, I suppose, accepted in an informal sense in France in the early 1600's. But she was not actually canonized a saint in the Catholic Church until the 1920s. Quite a few canonized Catholic saints were in serious trouble with the Church during their lifetimes, but Joan is the only one that I know of who was actually put to death by the Church, to the especially horrible death of being burned alive. It was the Church under the control of her English enemies, but it was still the official Catholic Church. That was long before Luther.

Average customer rating:

WOW
The Forgotten Art Of Trusting A Film To Truly TELL A Story
Black Robe
Okay, not a barn burner though
New France, now seemingly forgotten

Black Robe
Starring: Lothaire Bluteau , Aden Young , Sandrine Holt , August Schellenberg , and Tantoo Cardinal
Director: Bruce Beresford
Manufacturer: Vidmark / Trimark
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Action & Adventure | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Religion | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $7.49 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

( B ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

The Mission (Two-Disc Special Edition)
The Last of the Mohicans (Director's Expanded Edition)
Incident at Oglala - The Leonard Peltier Story
The Last of His Tribe
Black Robe: A Novel

ASIN: 1573623903
Release Date: 1998-07-08