Black Robe

Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe is one of those rare historical films that refuses to make history comfortable. Released in 1991 as a Canadian–Australian co-production, and adapted by Brian Moore from his own 1985 novel, the film follows Father Laforgue, a Jesuit missionary who undertakes an arduous and perilous journey through the vast wilderness of seventeenth-century New France, seeking to reach a remote Christian mission and bring the consolations — and convictions — of Christianity to Indigenous communities. Lothaire Bluteau plays Laforgue, with Aden Young, Sandrine Holt, August Schellenberg and Tantoo Cardinal in significant roles.

Yet to categorise Black Robe merely as a historical adventure or missionary drama is to diminish the extraordinary complexity of what Beresford has fashioned. This is, at heart, a film about the collision of incompatible worldviews — religion and spirituality, civilisation and wilderness, faith and cultural arrogance, love and possession, survival and morality. More significantly, it is a film about colonialism before the vocabulary of post-colonial discourse had become the principal lens through which we interrogate such encounters. Laforgue does not conceive of himself as a coloniser. He sincerely believes that he is saving souls. And therein resides the film’s most profound irony: the most consequential forms of cultural domination are not always perpetrated by men who believe themselves to be doing evil.

Set in 1634, the film begins with Laforgue being dispatched into the Canadian wilderness to establish contact with a distant mission. His journey takes him across immense forests and treacherous rivers, through snow, hunger, illness and danger, accompanied by Algonquin guides and travellers. On paper, the premise might suggest the makings of an epic frontier adventure. Beresford, however, proceeds to dismantle almost every convention associated with that genre.

There are no stirring declarations about the inevitable triumph of civilisation, no reassuring mythology of heroic pioneers conquering an untamed continent, and precious little of the romanticised frontier imagery that has traditionally accompanied historical cinema. Instead, the wilderness is cold, wet, hungry, frightening and profoundly indifferent to human aspiration. Men become exhausted; bodies succumb to disease; hunger gnaws at the travellers; violence erupts with terrifying suddenness; people are tortured and killed. The journey consequently becomes less a geographical expedition than a descent into the human psyche, where faith, fear, instinct and cultural prejudice are stripped of their civilised disguises.

The great achievement of Lothaire Bluteau’s performance is that Laforgue is never permitted to settle comfortably into either the category of saint or that of villain. He genuinely believes. He believes Christianity embodies ultimate truth. He believes baptism can rescue Indigenous souls from eternal damnation. He believes that his mission is, in the most literal sense, an act of love. Yet from the perspective of those upon whom his convictions are being imposed, that very certainty can appear less like compassion than an astonishing form of spiritual arrogance.

This is the film’s central moral paradox: Laforgue’s intentions may be sincere, but sincerity does not render cultural domination benign. He does not arrive as an imperial conqueror with soldiers and weapons; he arrives carrying a cross. Yet the cross itself represents an attempt to displace one spiritual universe with another. Beresford’s achievement lies in refusing to make Laforgue consciously hypocritical. He is considerably more interesting than that. His goodness and his arrogance spring from precisely the same source: absolute certainty.

Perhaps the film’s most intellectually compelling proposition is that Christianity and Indigenous spirituality are not presented as complete opposites. The Jesuits believe profoundly in the supernatural; the Algonquin do as well. Both possess rituals, taboos, spiritual authorities and conceptions of forces beyond the visible world. Both seek to comprehend suffering through a religious framework. Both attempt to decipher the mysterious relationship between human beings and the natural world.

The distinction, therefore, is not that one civilisation possesses spirituality while the other does not. Rather, it lies in the assumption — common to both — that one’s own spiritual system constitutes the correct interpretation of reality. Each possesses a cosmology; each possesses conviction; and each is capable of mistaking conviction for universal truth. This renders the encounters between Laforgue and the Indigenous characters considerably more sophisticated than the conventional missionary-versus-“native” narrative. The tragedy is not that the two cultures have nothing in common, but that they possess profound similarities which they are frequently incapable of recognising.

August Schellenberg’s Chomina is consequently one of the film’s most compelling figures. He is not merely the Indigenous guide whose narrative purpose is to shepherd the European protagonist through an unfamiliar landscape. He possesses his own worldview, loyalties, fears, prejudices and understanding of the natural and spiritual order. His relationship with Laforgue is therefore characterised by a fascinating amalgam of respect, suspicion, curiosity and incomprehension. Each man recognises something in the other, yet neither can fully comprehend the intellectual and spiritual universe from which the other emerges.

Aden Young’s Daniel introduces another important dimension to the film. Christian yet Indigenous, he occupies the uneasy borderland between two cultures and consequently belongs entirely to neither. His existence embodies one of the film’s most poignant questions: what becomes of the individual when cultures collide and identity itself becomes contested territory? Daniel understands elements of both worlds, but such knowledge does not necessarily liberate him. On the contrary, it may render his predicament even more painful, for he is condemned to see the contradictions that others can afford to ignore.

Peter James’s cinematography is extraordinary. The Canadian landscape is photographed not merely as picturesque scenery but as an immense, almost sentient presence — beautiful, impenetrable and indifferent. Forests, rivers, snow, mist and darkness dominate the visual field. The wilderness appears almost infinite, while human beings are reduced to tiny and vulnerable figures moving through an environment that owes them nothing.

This is crucial to the film’s atmosphere. The landscape continually reminds us that these characters inhabit a world bereft of the conveniences upon which modern humanity has come to depend. There are no roads, vehicles, hospitals, telecommunications or reliable infrastructure to soften the hostility of nature. Distance has a physical meaning. Survival is an achievement. Merely reaching one’s destination becomes an ordeal. Beresford makes the wilderness not a backdrop to the narrative but one of its principal characters.

Georges Delerue’s score complements this visual austerity with remarkable restraint. Delerue, one of cinema’s great composers, does not smother the film in melodramatic musical cues instructing the audience when to feel awe, fear or sorrow. Instead, his music possesses a mournful, almost spiritual quality, reinforcing the impression that we are witnessing not an adventure in the conventional sense but a tragedy unfolding at the intersection of faith, culture and history.

The violence is equally uncompromising. Some of the film’s most disturbing passages involve torture, murder and physical suffering, yet Beresford refuses to transform them into conventional action sequences. There is little exhilaration in the violence and no glamour attached to it. Pain is prolonged; bodies are fragile; death is ugly and often arbitrary. In doing so, Black Robe denies the viewer the comfortable distance that historical cinema can sometimes provide. We are not permitted merely to observe the violence of another age; we are compelled to contemplate the human beings who endured it.

The film’s greatest intellectual strength, however, lies in its refusal to offer the easy condemnation of Christianity that a lesser work might have embraced. Beresford asks a far more difficult question: Can an individual sincerely believe that he is helping another person while simultaneously participating in the destruction of that person’s culture?

Laforgue is not necessarily a bad man. Indeed, the unsettling power of the character lies precisely in the fact that he is not. His intentions are sincere; his faith is genuine; his sacrifices are real. Yet he is also participating, however unintentionally, in a historical process vastly larger than himself. His personal virtue cannot absolve the consequences of the cultural enterprise to which he has devoted his life.

This is what makes Black Robe such an unusually mature meditation on colonialism. History is rarely divided into the reassuring categories of heroes and villains. Men can be compassionate and destructive, sincere and misguided, courageous and arrogant, sometimes simultaneously. The moral ambiguity is not a defect of the narrative; it is its very subject.

Lothaire Bluteau is superb as Laforgue. His gaunt physical presence and restrained performance give the Jesuit an almost ascetic intensity. His faith is never reduced to theatrical piety; instead, it manifests itself through a quiet, sometimes unsettling conviction. August Schellenberg is equally impressive as Chomina, bringing dignity, intelligence and ambiguity to a character who might easily have been reduced to a stereotypical Indigenous guide. Sandrine Holt lends Annuka considerable strength and presence, while Aden Young, making his screen debut, provides an important bridge between the European and Indigenous worlds.

The film is also linguistically remarkable. Much of its dialogue is spoken in Algonquin, reflecting the language of the Indigenous characters of the region, while Cree and Mohawk are also heard in portions of the film, particularly during intertribal conflict. This linguistic authenticity contributes enormously to the film’s immersive quality. Black Robe is consequently one of the relatively rare historical films in which an Indigenous language is not merely decorative but forms a substantial part of the dramatic texture.

In an era when historical cinema frequently attempts to make the past comprehensible by filtering it through the moral vocabulary of the present, Black Robe does something considerably more difficult: it asks us to inhabit a world in which competing systems of belief are simultaneously sincere, incompatible and consequential.

The result is a magnificent, uncompromising and deeply unsettling historical drama. Bruce Beresford transforms Brian Moore’s novel into something almost physically immersive — a journey through freezing forests, treacherous rivers and hostile terrain that gradually becomes a journey into the contradictions of faith, identity and colonialism.

Its greatest achievement is that it understands a truth that history, in its complexity, persistently demands of us: the past cannot always be reduced to the comforting simplicity of good intentions and bad intentions. Laforgue can be sincere and misguided at once. The Indigenous characters can be sympathetic without being romanticised. Christianity can offer genuine spiritual conviction while simultaneously becoming an instrument of cultural intrusion. And civilisation, when it arrives bearing the certainty of its own righteousness, may prove every bit as disruptive as the wilderness it claims to conquer.

Black Robe does not merely tell us about a collision between cultures. It makes us confront the uncomfortable possibility that, in the collision of civilisations, those who believe most fervently in their own benevolence may sometimes be the least capable of recognising the violence inherent in their certainty.