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| Black Robe | 
 enlarge | Director: Bruce Beresford
Actors: Lothaire Bluteau, Aden Young, Sandrine Holt, August Schellenberg, Tantoo Cardinal
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy New: $3.00
You Save: $11.98 (80%)
New (42) Used (18) from $2.72
Avg. Customer Rating:  65 reviews
Sales Rank: 12121
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 101
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.2 x 0.6
MPN: D1002204D
ISBN: 0792850246
UPC: 027616864352
EAN: 9780792850243
ASIN: B00005BKZS
Theatrical Release Date: October 4, 1991
Release Date: July 10, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New and factory sealed dvd. Ships fast from our 170,000 sf warehouse in St. Louis, MO.
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Amazon.com
Forget about Kevin Costner's sun-kissed, water-colored, Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves. Black Robe, which was directed by Bruce Beresford, a director who gave the world the finest film of the early '80s Australian new wave, Breaker Morant, and who continually collides cultures and ethnicity in his films (Mister Johnson, Driving Miss Daisy), matches and surpasses the Costner epic as an expertly crafted, brutal saga of redemption and salvation. In 1634 a young French Jesuit missionary is assigned to trek 1,500 miles through the New France wilderness to a mission settled in Huron Indian country. Black Robe chronicles the journey of Father Laforgue (Lothaire Blutheau) as he leaves his Jesuit brothers and, with the aid of a young translator and guide, Daniel (Aden Young), and eight canoes of Algonquin Indians, moves into the uncompromising Canadian northern territory on a die-hard mission to convert the natives. Mixing elements of Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans and Roland Joffé's The Mission, Beresford offers a restless tale of Laforgue's conflicted faith juxtaposed against the sublime spiritual harmony with the land that the Huron and Algonquin already hold. Black Robe dances to its own drummer and is tuned into the precarious balance between nature's mystery and spirit and the strident, unyielding religious ethic. The cinematography by Peter James is relentlessly cruel and bleak, but it absolutely conveys the obstacles that face the idealistic and blind young priest, who by the end, has faced his own awakening. The film also features one of the late, great composer Georges Delerue's most noble scores. --Paula Nechak
Description
From acclaimed director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies) and adapted by screenwriter Brian Moore from his novel of the same name, Black Robe is "amazing an adventure film that is as intelligent as it is enthralling" (US)! French Jesuit missionary Father Laforgue travels to the magnificently austere Canadian wilderness to save the souls of a "savage and godless" peoplethe native tribes of the Huron and Algonquin. But the natives, who have their own spiritual value system that differs drastically from Christianity, are immediately suspicious, resentful and openly hostile toward the intrusive "Black Robe." And when Laforgue hires a reluctant group of Algonquin to escort him on a harrowing 1500-mile journey up the broad and sinuous St. Lawrence River, a devastating chain of events not only causes him to question his deeply held beliefs but also forever changes the course of history for the natives' way of life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 60 more reviews...
 A true Priest trying to save the damned March 11, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful movie and it shows how reprobate our society are. it shows how, even in bad conditions and even death, that we will must preach God's word. The part where the priest baptizes that women who was dying with the arrow in her neck shows the true charity of what the Jesuits were doing. He was a man who was tryin to save a hopeless and ignorant people. It shows that some people are just destined for hell and how few get on the road that is narrow. The priest litterally takes on evil and satan when he goes into the forest. He deals with abandonment, torture, and death. But in the end people were saved and the greater glory of God shown, and thus his accomplished his mission as far as saving some souls. A wonderful movie.
Blackrobe March 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. No stars and a Canadian film, so it never got big box office. The encounter between Christian missionaries and Native people I have never before seen so senstively told. There are no bad guys. It neither glorifies Christian missionaries nor does it romanticize the lives of the Native people, something "Dances with Wolves" does.
If you want a film that says the Native people were living in a kind of Eden that was contaminated by the Europeans; or if you want to see how benighted the Indians were before they were saved by the Gospel, this is not your kind of movie. But if you want to see character development on so many levels, to see the goodness and evil that can exist simultaneously within us, to see people struggle to find each other in the midst of misunderstanding and cultural presuppositions, this is well worth your viewing time. Plus, the action is exciting and the scenery is incredible.
 It's okay. February 23, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The movie is okay. It seems like it tries to pack a lot of story into a a short time.
Stunning & Heartbreaking January 16, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This visually stunning and ultimately heartbreaking film by Bruce Beresford became something of a rental cult classic after it disappeared from theaters. Based on Brian Moore's fine novel of the same name (which I also read), the film's central character is young Father Laforgue, an idealistic French Jesuit priest who is determined to bring the light of salvation to the savages, i.e., the Algonquin, Mohawk, and Huron nations who inhabit "New France" in the Canadian frontier in the mid-17th century. The title of the film refers to the name the Indians have given to the French priests because of their long black habits.
Fr. Laforgue is given a mission at the start of the film: to travel 1,500 miles north by river to the Jesuit mission in Huron territory, to assist the aging priest who can no longer function on his own there. Fr. Laforgue's long journey by canoe, guided by a band of Algonquin who have agreed to take him to Huron country for a heap of trade goods, is doubly perilous as it begins just as winter is setting in. The journey north comprises most of the film, and for all concerned becomes one of evolution of the mind and soul as well as bodily hardship, as Fr. Laforgue and his Algonquin companions get to know each other and begin to question the assumptions that each has made of the other's culture.
The cinematography is breathtaking, and as the film was shot on location in Canada during mid-winter, the actors involved have referred to this shoot as one of the most painful and difficult in their experience. The cast is wonderful, with special mention to Lothaire Bluteau as Fr. Laforgue and August Schellenberg as Chomina, the Algonquin chief. Composer Georges Delrue produced a beautiful score for the film, which enhances but never intrudes upon it (Delrue also did the striking score for "Anne of a Thousand Days"). The rest of the cast is also exceptional, with Aden Young giving a nicely restrained performance of the young Frenchman who accompanies Fr. Laforgue, but during the journey slowly goes "native under the skin", as it is sometimes put.
The film is sad and at times quite disturbing, exploring the cruelty, both unintended and deliberate, that humans inflict upon each other in the name of cultural bonding and beliefs. The condescension of white Europeans toward Native cultures is not spared, but neither is the ritual cruelty inflicted by Indians of different tribal affiliations on each other. Fr. Laforgue and his companions are ambushed and captured by a band of Mohawks on the way northward and are tortured and humiliated by them, barely escaping via the seduction of the Mohawk guard by Chomina's beautiful young daughter. In fact, there was some outcry in the Native community when the film came out because the Mohawks are shown only as brutal torturers without any other social context. However, as Chomina grimly points out to Fr. Laforgue, when he protests that these Mohawks are nothing like Chomina and his family, "We would have done the same thing." More than anything else, "Black Robe" is an indictment of assumptions of cultural and spiritual superiority - a trait shared in the film by both the Natives and the Europeans.
The film's ending presages the catastrophe for Native peoples that European emigration to and conquest of North America will bring about in another 150 years. However, on an individual note, it is a tender and evolved ending. By the end of his journey, Fr. Laforgue questions whether acceptance of baptism without understanding its meaning represents a true salvation. When a man among the crowd of Hurons asks Fr. Laforgue if he loves them, Fr. Laforgue looks out at them and sees not a group of savage souls to add to the Christian heaven, but indivdual human beings. "Yes," he whispers, his eyes filling with tears, "I love you."
This is a very affecting film and a far superior entry into the European/Native "culture clash" genre than films such as Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves" and Michael Mann's "Last of the Mohicans". I don't say that these films did not work on their own terms or that they did not at least try to repair decades of the film industry's insensitive portrayals of indigenous peoples, but those films were made and intended for the action/adventure market and show it.
"Black Robe" is a vastly more complex and adult - and less comfortable - exploration of the "culture clash" theme, and its emotional impact lingers in the mind and heart long after the credits fade.
Oustanding feature! October 24, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the most realistic depiction of Native Americans I have seen in the wide screen. The movie sets in the year 1634, roughly 20 years after the founding of Quebec and 14 years after the landing of the Mayflower. Samuel de Champlain is still the governor of the precariously held French settlement.
Historical background: Champlain had earlier accompanied a party of Huron and/or Abenaki in an incursion south, along the shores of the lake he named after himself. They came across a party of Iroquois near today's Ticonderoga and, in the ensuing battle, Champlain shot the leader of the Iroquois party, thus deciding the encounter. The Iroquois never forgot and from that moment on they became rivals of both the French and the northern Indians.
The movie: It is in that context that the Jesuits decide to send another priest to the Huron Mission, upstream the Saint Lawrence, along the shores of Lac Frontenac (now lake Ontario).
The savage beauty of the landscapes is breathtaking. The cruelty of the Canadian winter is powerfully conveyed in all its splendor. The movie makes a very successful effort to portray the Native Americans as they were: bound by their own set of rules, fears, and beliefs, totally alien to Europeans but not so to the young French-Canadian. The end of the movie (which I will not describe here) was a direct consequence of M. Champlain shot at Ticonderoga.
This is a film that touches the soul.
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