Published 2018 on Down Under Flix
Director: Bruce Beresford
Director: Bruce Beresford
Stars: Lothaire Bluteau, Aden Young, August Schellenberg, Tantoo Cardinal,
Sandrine Holt
In
my mind, the past 40 years have yielded three masterful English language
historical films about thwarted attempts by Jesuit missionaries to spread
Christianity to new frontiers. Those three films are Roland Joffe’s 1986
film The Mission,
set in South America in the mid-1700s; Bruce Beresford’s 1991 film Black Robe, set in Canada in
the 1630s; and Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence, set in Japan around the same time. These
films have experienced differing receptions: Joffe’s film won the Palme d’Or at
Cannes, was nominated for seven Oscars, and its Morricone score still pervades
popular culture; Beresford’s film won a smattering of Canadian and Australian
film awards, as well as the Golden Reel Award for highest grossing Canadian film
that year, but didn’t exactly set the world alight (later Golden Reel
recipients include Johnny
Mnemonic and Air
Bud, just for context); and shockingly, Scorsese’s film caused nary
a murmur on its release, despite its status as a long-gestating passion project
from a director widely considered the premier filmmaker of the era. While my
focus in this review is squarely on Black
Robe (given Down Under Flix’s Antipodean brief and the film’s
status as a Canadian-Australian co-production from an Australian director), I
am also fascinated by how these films complement and diverge from each other,
and will touch on this later.
The
protagonist of Black Robe is
Jesuit priest Father LaForgue, played by Lothaire Bluteau, a Canadian actor who
headlined the acclaimed Jesus
of Montreal two years earlier. LaForgue embarks on a 1500 mile
journey through severe wintry terrain accompanied by Daniel (Aden Young) and a
posse of Algonquin Indians headed by Chomina (August Schellenberg). They
encounter opposition in the form of the violent Iriquois tribe, and LaForgue’s
compassion for his resistant flock is tested.
I’ve
frequently sung the praises of director Beresford, whose latest film, Ladies in Black, is currently
in theatres and is an absolute delight. Black Robe capped a trio
of films, preceded by Driving
Miss Daisy and Mister
Johnson (reviewed here), that constitutes one of the best one-two-three punches of
the late twentieth century. That one-two-three punch should have elevated
Beresford to all-timer status. But while Driving Miss Daisy was a major commercial
success and scored the Academy Award for Best Picture (albeit with no Best
Director nomination for Beresford), there was no real ripple effect on those
later films. Mister Johnson was,
Beresford notes, “seen by no-one” despite being “the best reviewed film I ever
made by far” (now a Criterion title), and Black Robe, despite wide acclaim, made only a
minor dent in the public consciousness. The minimal ripple effect is
unsurprising; as Beresford observes in There’s
a Fax from Bruce, a collection of published correspondence from the
1990s between the director and regular producer Sue Milliken, “no-one who
saw Daisy will
want to see Black Robe”
despite it being “the best thing I’ve done” and a film that “will grow with the
passing of time”.
With
its superior craftsmanship and intelligent treatment of the material – adapted
by Brian Moore from his own novel – Black
Robe is, indeed, a film built to last. The production reunited
Beresford with several regular collaborators, including composer Georges
Delerue, cinematographer Peter James (who would turn his lens to another famous
film about survival in harsh environs, Alive,
two years later), editor Tim Wellburn, and production designer Herbert Pinter,
all of whom do exemplary work. Praise is especially due to James’ painterly
compositions. The film is not visually stylish in the same way as The Mission and Silence – the former milks
its lush South American setting, while the latter homages the aesthetic of
Akira Kurosawa and other classic Japanese filmmakers, as well as featuring some
of Scorsese’s own stylistic flourishes – but it is visually striking.
Like Manganinnie (reviewed here), Black Robe captures
an inhospitable landscape, and here that inhospitable landscape is both
environmental and spiritual. Black
Robe also contains some of the most violent moments I can
recall seeing in a Beresford production, but the film overall takes a leaf from
George Miller’s Mad Max –
a film Beresford has expressed great admiration for – in that violent acts are
rarely gratuitously shown, but rather conjured through editing and sound and
predominantly left to the imagination (editor Wellburn, it’s worth noting,
worked on Mad Max 2).
LaForgue
is a somewhat inexpressive, prickly character, especially in comparison to the
protagonists of the other titles spotlighted at the start of this review; he
does not radiate the benevolent warmth of Jeremy Irons’ Father Gabriel in The Mission, or command
sympathy like Andrew Garfield’s anguished Father Rodrigues in Silence. Actor Bluteau conveys
the contradictory tides of the character – his conflicting feelings of defeat
and conviction, his strained compassion and increasing distaste for his
immovable flock– and these tides also cut to the fundamental differences
between Black Robe and
the two aforementioned films.
The
Mission, Black Robe, and Silence are all
fundamentally tragedies, but of different stripes. In The Mission, Irons’ Father
Gabriel is a pure priestly figure whose mission crumbles under the force of
political machinations, while Robert De Niro’s Captain Mendoza, redeemed from
life of transgression through Christianity, is forced to turn back to violence,
adopting the wrong way for the right cause. In Silence, Scorsese grapples with the crises of
three lone priests in a foreign, violent land, with its central figure,
Garfield’s Father Rodrigues, forced by Japanese authorities to choose between
publicly renouncing God to save innocent lives, damning himself in the process,
or holding fast to his beliefs and in turn dooming others to death. It’s a
dramatisation of spiritual torment through an existential lens, and is
consistent with the existential themes and intermingling of the sacred and
profane threaded throughout Scorsese’s filmography. Black Robe neither
romanticises its protagonists like The
Mission nor dips its toes into existential waters like Silence; it presents, in
Beresford’s characteristically straightforward, unaffected style, an unseen but
unrelenting spiritual warfare between good and evil, enacted and manifested
through the violent clash of cultures and beliefs. It’s an exceptional film and
a jewel in the crown of Beresford’s varied filmography.
Ben Kooyman