Friday, January 29, 2010
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Set in 1634, the Film begins in the tiny French settlement that will one day become Quebec City. There, Jesuit missionaries are trying to encourage the local Algonquin Indians to embrace Christianity, with thus far only limited results. Samuel de Champlain, founder of the settlement, sends Father LaForgue, a young Jesuit priest, to find a distant Catholic mission in a Huron village.
LaForgue is accompanied on his journey by a non- Jesuit assistant, Daniel, and a group of Algonquin Indians who Champlain has ordered to guide him to the Huron village. This group includes Chomina -an older, experienced traveller who has clairvoyant dreams -his wife and Annuka their daughter. As they journey across the lakes and Forests, Daniel and Annuka Fall in love, to the discomfort of the celibate LaFogue.
The group meets with a band of Montagnais Indians who have never met Frenchmen before. The Montagnais shaman is suspicious and implicitly Jealous] of Lafarge's influence over the Algonquians, and accuses him of being a devil. He encourages Chomia and the other Algonquians to abandon the two Frenchmen and travel instead to a winter hunting lodge. This they do, paddling away from the Frenchmen LaForge accept his Fate, but Daniel is determined to stay with Annuka and follows the Indians as they march across the forest. When one Indian tries to shoot Daniel, Chomia is consumed by guilt at having betraying Champlain's trust, and he and the other Algonquians return with Daniel to try to find LaForge.
However, as they recover LaForge, a party of Iroquois attacks them, killing Chomias wife and taking the rest captive. They are taken to an Iroquois fortress, where they are beaten and told they will be slowly tortured to death. Annuka helps them escape by seducing a guard, but Chomina is mortally wounded. They are forced to leave Chomina to freeze to death in the snow, LaForge tries, unsuccessfully, to persuade Chomina to embrace Christ before he dies. When Chomina dies, he sees the She- Manitou appearing to him.
Annuka and Daniel take LaForge to the outskirts of the Huron settlement, but leave him to enter it alone, because Chomina had dreamed that this must happen. LaForgue finds all but one of the French inhabitants’ dead, murdered by the Hurons who blamed them for a smallpox epidemic. The last survivor tells LaForgue that the Hurons Are dying and he should offer to save them by baptizing them. LaForgue confronts the Hurons. When their leader asks Laforgue if he loves them, Laforgue thinks of the faces of all the Indians he has met on his journey, and answers yes. The leader then asks him to baptizing them, and the Hurons accept Christianity. The film ends with a golden sunrise, but then an intertile explains that fifteen years later the Hurons were massacred by the Iroquois, and the French mission was destroyed.
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