BLACK ROBE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
BLACK ROBE is movie directed by Bruce Beresford from a script by Brian Moore and based Moore's 1985 novel of the same name. The film stars Lothaire Bluteau, Aden Young, Sandrine Holt, August Schellenberg, and Tantoo Cardinal. Rated R due to violence, sex.
BLACK ROBE is the story of an odyssey, both physical and spiritual, of a French Jesuit missionary who in 1634 sets out from the Quebec of Champlain 1500 miles with a band of Algonquins by canoe to a mission which may or may not exist. The priest, Father Laforgue, is played by Lothaire Bluteau. (Bluteau played the title role in JESUS OF MONTREAL.) Laforgue begins as a rigid European dedicated to saving the savages, ends as someone else.
Brian (pronounced Bree-an) Moore, the author of THE LONELINESS OF JUDITH HEARNE and THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY (which both became movies), was quick, in an interview with The Seattle Times' John Hartl this week, to dismiss comparisons of BLACK ROBE with DANCES WITH WOLVES. Both films are revisionist historical dramas about the doomed cultures of Native Americans in their early contacts with whites. Both use the white character as the narrative focus. Both use Native American actors in appropriate roles and depict them speaking their own languages. Both use subtitles for the non-English dialogue. Moore said, "[DWW] is an old-fashioned, main-stream movie, except that the whites are the bad guys. And the Indians are all absolute saints, just like they were in THE MISSION. We tried not to do that."
"The only thing that shocked us when we saw DANCES WITH WOLVES was the use of subtitles for the Indians. We thought our film would be the first to do that."
One obvious difference is that BLACK ROBE exposes its audience to a different cultural group than the more commonly used Plains Indians, namely Northern Woodlands culture. Three native groups appear in the film: Algonquins, Iroquois, and Hurons. They are distinctively depicted and even the Iroquois are presented as humans, albeit with their own standards and expectations. This difference by itself makes the film fascinating and novel.
The Native Americans by speaking their own languages and commenting on the actions and ideas of the whites, especially Laforgue, give us a Rashomon-esque effect -- multiple perceptions creating multiple truths -- give the audience new insights into their own culture. The culture clashes, the culture shocks are often amusing, the only comic relief often in what is mostly a very serious, tense and sober film, full of an air of impending disaster, like the fall moving toward winter.
Another cinematic quality that recommends BLACK ROBE is the use of landscape photography. Every outdoor shot frames scenery that is often literally breath-taking; by that I mean that I gasped frequently at the backgrounds of the human drama transpiring in the foreground. Beresford's cinematographer is Peter James, who worked on DRIVING MISS DAISY and MISTER JOHNSON, too. Because of budgetary limitations the film was pretty much shot in narrative order to capture the changing seasons. Beresford added flashbacks to Laforgue's earlier life in France as well as black-and-white dream sequences. These try to do the job of the internal monologues that dominate Moore's novel. One of the Seattle critics thought the film needed a voice-over narration. I'm just as glad they avoided that since voice-overs are so problematical. I think the photography and Bluteau's skills as an actor are sufficient to fill us on what and why people are thinking and doing as they do.
Bluteau is an impressive screen presence. His role is physically demanding and his character's impassivity and surpressed emotions make his job all the harder. He was hardly recognizable as the same actor who played JESUS OF MONTREAL, a credit to his skills.
The other actors are uniformly convincing. Aden Young is plays a young French who gets permission to travel and assist Black Robe, ostensibly "for the greater glory of God," but in reality because he's bored with building huts for Champlain and wants to go adventuring. August Schellenberg plays the Algonquin chief who becomes a spiritual teacher for Laforgue, Tantoo Cardinal his wife, and Sandrine Holt his daughter who shocks Laforgue into a new way of thinking.
I have one nit to pick, however. The film makes a point of having Native Americans speaking their own languages, but the French characters all speak English. Father Laforgue's "Indian" name is Black Robe and when the Native Americans are speaking in their own languages about Black Robe, they literally say "Black Robe", not even "Robe noir" or whatever the phrase is in French. Why don't the French speak French? Film-making conventions permit us to pretend they are speaking French instead of English, but given the subtitling of some of the non-English, this inconsistency and convention becomes all the more illogical and distracting.
The film is a joint Canadian-Australian production. A Canadian director was originally set to film BLACK ROBE but Moore didn't like the script and resisted pressure to create a violent hook to open the film. Fortunately, Beresford came along with the $107 million dollars of clout from DRIVING MISS DAISY behind him. There is no U. S. (Hollywood) money in the production -- although Samuel Goldwyn is distributing the film in the U.S., as they did HENRY V and LONGTIME COMPANION, two other hard-to-sell movies -- and it shows both negatively and positively. The negatives include a certain lack of visual richness or depth, the kind of budget shortcuts that one sees in TV movies; one can seldom forget that one is watching modern people wearing funny clothes. The positives include a spiritual depth that makes DANCES WITH WOLVES seem all the more a shallow star-vehicle that it may have originally.
Laforgue changes, softens and humanizes his European, Christian "superiority." The natives change in various ways that will lead to their cultural (and physical) extinction. Laforgue's intentions are sincere, even when he's being a bigot; his love for the natives at the end is real. But he and the rest that will follow are the agents of one of the great cultural tragedies of history. BLACK ROBE does the best job of any similar film I've seen of presenting the Native Americans as they were. It neither embraces (or patronizes) them or the stereotypes built up about them. They are people, who deserved better than they got.
The next step is a film without a white lead on whom to hang the narrative. There have been a few over the years, such as the estimable POWWOW HIGHWAY, but they were mostly independent films with limited exposure.
BLACK ROBE cannot, I think, ever find a mass audience a la DANCES WITH WOLVES. The main drawback to achieving mass success is that BLACK ROBE requires an audience that knows something, that can think, that doesn't require cinematic hand-holding or unambiguous narrative.
BLACK ROBE is a powerful, beautiful film that is sure to have an effect on the audiences that do see it, an effect that will be hard to dismiss or forget.
I recommend BLACK ROBE at full prices, but do be forewarned that there is some gruesome violence in the middle of the film. I closed my eyes and told Lyndol to tell me when it was over.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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