Good Movie Alert: Black Robe. This 1991 film is solid, serious Lenten fare. I recall that my father included in his Lenten practice reading of religious inspiring literature. I have been trying to use my Netflix membership to view similarly uplifting movies. This one is at the top of the list.
It resembles The Mission: poignant soundtrack, intelligent and courageous Jesuit priests, magnificent and authentic scenery, frightful violence, and an ending that is at once saddening and thrilling. Along with that movie, Keys of the Kingdom, and Inn of the Seventh Happiness, this tops the list of great mission movies.
Rated R, it is clearly adult fare due to graphic (but not suggestive) sexuality and violence (more suggested than actually portrayed.) As a viewer, I felt an unusual historic authenticity about the entire film, even more so than The Mission or Last of the Mohicans and infinitely more than the Holywood-ish, politically-correct Dances with Wolves. It demonstrates a most realistic anthropological sensibility in disclosing the darker and lighter sides of the native Americans, the French and the Jesuits themselves. The interactions between Jesuit and Indian were profoundly lucid in unveiling the cultural dissonance and mutual incomprehension between the groups: the clock, the alphabet, and views on marriage and heaven. Daniel, a young frontier Frenchman, in love with a beautiful Algonquin maiden, straddles both worlds and helps the viewer see the values, disvalues and conflict between the two human, and imperfect, cultures.
In the end, however, beneath and beyond a dark realism and relativism, the movie is about faith, courage, and martyrdom. It is one beautiful film!
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