Bruce Beresford's rendition of a Brian Moore novel about a French Jesuit with a touch of a martyr complex ("Death is almost certain") on a mission among Canadian Indians in the early Seventeenth Century. The subject and setting might provoke a wish that the spirit of Willa Cather -- the Willa Cather of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock -- would somehow enter the body of Bruce Beresford. She, however, together with her detachment and imaginative omniscience, stayed well away. Instead, the movie makes no bones about embracing the belief system of the resident Algonquins in preference to that of the interloping Catholics. (Cf. The Last Wave, The Emerald Forest, never mind the mundane Dances with Wolves.) The chief's recurrent dream, in the pictorial style of a Stevie Nicks rock video, comes literally true. As does -- in one of those printed epilogues that save the moviemaker so much time and trouble -- the prophecy of what will befall the Indians should they welcome the Christian God. (It isn't good.) And we can all see with our own eyes that the she-manitou shows up on schedule to conduct a dying Indian into the next world. No such validation is granted the envoy of Christianity. And if it were -- if some translucent archangel were to stop by to buck up the morose missionary -- the word that would correctly come to mind would be kitsch. With Lothaire Bluteau. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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