Black Robe (1991)

I watched this because I just read the book Middle Ground, by Richard White, about Frenchmen and Indians in the upper Midwest in the seventeenth century, and I remembered that I had heard about this movie a while ago and never followed up. Sure enough, here we have a foresaken Jesuit lost in the Michigan frontier and trying to convert Indians who want nothing to do with him.

This movie does a good job of not idealizing the lives of the Native Americans - they are at war, they trust obviously-ridiculous sorcerers, etc - but also making it clear that the Frenchmen are no saviors. The piety of the Jesuit remains incomprehensible throughout. He often says things like, "This country is damned by the devil," when the camera is showing gorgeous river/mountains footage. Good reminder that for seventeenth-century Europeans, wilderness was not a good word yet.

This was directed by Bruce Beresford, who apparently also directed "Driving Miss Daisy," though you could have fooled me. I guess there's some sort of races-understanding-each-other theme going on, but "Black Robe" can be pretty brutal - arrows through the neck, torture, quasi-rape. Of course, there's a lovely Indian maiden, played by an actress who's actually Asian, who ends up falling in love with the younger Frenchman who accompanies the Jesuit on his mission. (She's the reason for the quasi-rape, as she uses her wiles to get the group out of captivity when they're about to be killed by the Iroquois.) Apparently some Native American groups objected to the torture scenes. I object to the fact that the movie does that thing where the actors speak to each other in French-accented English when in real life they really would have been speaking French. I hate that thing.