Killing fields in South America

Press, 2 April 1987, Page 22

Killing fields in South America

at the cinema

hans petrovic

“The Mission,” which won one of this year’s Academy Awards for best cinematography, will start at the Midcity tomorrow.

The film focuses on an acute, if obscure, moment in world history when politics and unchained human brutality led to “a moment in which we lost our innocence,” as the director, Roland Joffe, puts it. It tells of the carving up of Latin American territories by the Spanish and Portuguese in the mideighteenth century and the destruction of Jesuit missions deep in the rain forests so as better to exploit the region’s mercantile opportunities. Hundreds of indigenous Indians were massacred as a result.

Jeremy Irons plays a Jesuit missionary (Gabriel) who founds a utopian and near-socialist community of Christian Indians in the jungle; Robert De Niro is an opportunistic slave-trader (Mendoza) whom Gabriel converts from predator to pious protector of the Guarani tribespeople. As the missions are attacked, Gabriel and Mendoza are forced by their consciences into divergent positions.

Mendoza mobilises a section of the Guarani to take up arms against the colonial invaders; Gabriel opts for passive resistance.

Neither is successful, and both are killed as the

missions are overrun and the Indians slaughtered.

The film’s emotional centre pivots around the agonising human and political dilemma that the two men face in the final stages of the story, and from that spring a variety of contemporary resonances that Joffe was enthusiastic to seize on — relating to the challenges facing the church in the turmoil of present-day South America; the legitimacy of “freedom-fight-ing”; the commercial exploitation of the Third World; the hypocrisy and corruption of realpolitik; and the human, effects of state-sanctioned violence. Irons and De Niro both give fine performances, the slight clash of acting styles helping, in the event, to heighten the uneasy moral tension between the two characters.

The jungle cinematography of Chris Menges is breathtaking: the range of natural lighting conditions caused problems during the shoot, but creates a luxuriant kaleidoscope of visual pleasures in the finished work.

The harrowing explosion of forces at the climax is marshalled by Joffe with exceptional skill.

The Italian co-producer, Fernando Ghia — whose previous involvements have included “The Red Tent” and “Lady Caroline Lamb,” plus films by Fellini (“Amarcord”) and Francesco Rosi (“The Mattei Affair,” "Lucky Lu-

ciano”) — had toyed with the basic formula behind “The Mission” for more than a decade before getting Robert Bolt to write it into a screenplay , in 1976. (Gabriel’s tortured beatitude is particularly reminiscent of Thomas More in Bolt’s earlier “A Man for All Seasons.’’) ' The script languished until David Puttnam, at Enigma Productions.

matched Ghia with Joffe in 1984. Many of the team responsible for "The Killing Fields” were reunited, including Joffe, Puttnam, Menges, the associate producer, lain Smith, and the editor, Jim Clark. Ennio Morricone provides the music.

The budget of the film was set at £17.7 million, but it finally came in at £16.4 million.