Screen

...But now comes the second stage of Laforgue's physical and spiritual ordeal...

...Chomina expresses no outrage when he faces his torturers and almost no dismay...

...This otherness is epitomized by Chomina and beautifully embodied by August Schellenberg...

...What do you think now...

...How can he urge upon any people a religion that, for want of a few drops of water, denies heaven to a man as noble as Chomina while opening the gates for many baptized mediocrities...

...The Algonquins live in a universe where forests speak and ghosts walk at night, where sadism toward enemies is always commendable and pity must always be taken as weakness, where a man should have many wives and copulation may be carried out in public...

...But for those passages in which natives speak English to the white, the dialogue is excellent...

...Beresford amazes because he is a modest virtuoso, a deft technician who can do anything he wants with a camera but who always trims his skills to the precise needs of his material...

...And, lest we be tempted to think of the Algonquins as "good Indians" and the Iroquois as "bad Indians" (as Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves divides the Plains Indians into good and bad according to which tribe is fighting on the movie star's side), Moore has written an exchange between Daniel and Chomina after the torture that gives a contemptuous backhander to any glib judgment on these strangers to our morality...

...Dizzied by the gulf between him and his designated spiritual wards, Laforgue feels spiritually undermined and is even unable to keep his assistant Daniel, in love with Chomina's daughter, from going native...

...They have also considered taking baptism as a magic cure for the epidemic...

...They have toyed with the idea of killing him...

...We are the same...

...his swift, peremptory cutting...

...Reflecting on the nobility and intrepidness of Chomina throughout the ordeal, and disturbed by the Christian insistence that, without baptism, there is no admission into the presence of God after death, Laforgue now begins to doubt not just the possibility of converting the Indians but the very purpose of the task...

...How Laforgue breaks out of his immobilizing puzzlement and into action, and how Bruce Beresford shows this recovery, constitute a thrilling, and thrillingly cinematic climax...

...Do you love us, Black Robe...

...And the second half is flawless...

...All these combine to make the first half of Black Robe absorbing despite its faults...

...The screen natives simply speak Algonquin among themselves, which is fine, but the English subtitles sometimes make the Indians sound quaint, even cute...

...SCREEN INTO THE WILDERNESS BERESFORD'S 'BLACK ROBE' Black Robe, Brian Moore's brief but complicated novel about a would-be martyr who learns that his real martyrdom is to stay alive in the service of a people whom he can't understand and who can't understand him, has been translated into film by the amazing, infuriating Bruce Beresford...

...Some of Beresford's visual tropes are off kilter...

...And Beresford infuriates because he is a master of spectacle who is also an ascetic...

...With Chomina, it's not so much a matter of courage...there's not really an English term for it, the nearest equivalent, I think, is good form...

...Didn't the previous missionary tell them it would work...

...Chomina repents the abandonment and returns with only his family and a few followers (now including Daniel) to retrieve the priest...

...When Chomina, wanting to fulfill his duty to Laforgue but overruled by his fellow braves and swayed by a malicious Indian magician, leaves the Jesuit in the wilderness, this abandonment seems like an inevitable fulfillment of the psychological defeat that Laforgue has already suffered...

...Because of these Algonquins, and especially because of Chomina's decisions and behavior, Laforgue's undertaking becomes a voyage into painful self-knowledge, which includes a realization of what his real fate is to be...

...His movies are packed with gorgeous imagery but Beresford refuses to let you gorge...

...RICHARD ALLEVA 18: 17 January 1992 Commonweal...

...The flashbacks to Laforgue's early priesthood in France, though they work in the book, don't do much for the movie because they seem stuck in arbitrarily rather than being detours taken by Laforgue's train of thought...

...Reduced to one hundred minutes of celluloid, it positively sprints, yet Beresford manages to retain many of the novel's nuances and contradictions...

...And Lothaire Bluteau's performance as the priest, though not bad, is problematic...

...If they showed pity, others would call them weak...

...and his ability to make a wintry landscape simultaneously suggest lofty beauty and the absolute rejection of anything human...

...CHOMINA No...

...There are some fumbles in the presentation of the first half of the odyssey...

...DANIEL I think the Iroquois are animals...

...Take your eyes off the screen for ten seconds and you will be confused when you look back...

...First, there is Laforgue's growing realization that he simply cannot change the way Native Americans view the world and, without such a shift in consciousness, no religious conversion can take place...

...Chomina sings in ritual defiance of his tormentors and if that singing seems to rise to a pitch of anguish when his son's throat is cut, that is probably what we make ourselves hear, not what the Algonquin puts into his song...

...An escape is effected but Chomina later dies of his wounds...

...The priest's disillusionment is twofold, and accomplished, like his physical journey, in two stages...

...Take your eyes off the screen for five crucial seconds towards the end and you will not only misunderstand the appointment the hero is keeping with destiny but you will cheat yourself of one of the most astonishing cinematic coups I've ever seen...

...In literary form, Moore's story was trim enough...

...But missionary and Algonquin are all taken prisoner by Iroquois who murder Chomina's family (excepting the daughter) before the chief's eyes...

...Black Robe is a piece of beautiful, stern, fiercely economical filemmaking...

...Most of Moore's alterations of his novel are excellent (especially his reduction of the young chief Neehatin in order to give more scope to Chomina), but he has jettisoned the joshing, semi-obscene English he invented as an equivalent Commonweal 17 January 1992: 17 of Algonquin speech...

...CHOMINA You wanted to join us...

...It is this otherness that Laforgue must struggle with at the ruined Huron mission at the end of the movie...

...But even if the "magic water" can cure, does this strange new priest really love them enough to work the miracle...

...But these flaws are more than offset by Beresford's strengths: his use of spectacle as psychology...

...The few Huron survivors of the epidemic confront the missionary...

...He will not surrender to his enemies an atom of his inner self...

...Beresford's economy and swiftness make the sequences of combat, capture, escape, and suffering breathtaking...

...And Laforgue replies...well, see the movie...

...It is precisely through his confrontation of Iroquois cruelty and his perception of Algonquin stoicism in the face of that cruelty that make Laforgue aware of the sheer otherness of these people he is trying to convert, an otherness that makes his religious mission seemingly impossible...

...He always cuts away from a breathtaking shot a couple of seconds before any other director would...

...Serving as Laforgue's bodyguards and guides are some Algonquins headed by one Chomina who has taken this commission not out of any love of the French but for the sake of keeping them as allies against the Iroquois...

...his ability to make secondary characters register vividly in a matter of seconds (note the implacable smile of the Iroquois chief and the dotted pattern his war paint makes on his cheeks...

...Daniel and his Algonquin love see Laforgue safely to the Huron mission (which still stands, though in ruin, and with its converts ravaged by a plague), then leave him at the priest's own request...

...Laforgue shows comparable fortitude but his is a display of courage reinforced by Christian faith...

...In the Quebec of 1634, Father Laforgue, a grimly evangelical Jesuit bracing himself for a glorious death at the hands of savages, is sent by his superior to find out if a Huron mission farther north is still in existence or has been destroyed by the fiercely expansionist Iroquois...