Forty years ago this week, The Mission arrived in cinemas in the United Kingdom. Directed by Roland Joffé and starring Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro, with one of the finest soundtracks ever composed for a film, it told the story of Jesuit missionaries in 18th-century South America, caught between their duty to the Church and the colonial powers determined to destroy the communities they had built.
Earlier this year I wrote about how the film affected me as a boy: the scene in which Father Gabriel, played by Irons, climbs above the Iguazú Falls and walks alone into Guaraní territory. He takes out an oboe and begins to play, and the tribesmen come out of the forest, unsure whether to kill him or listen. It made me want to be a Jesuit. Watching it again forty years on, I’m struck by how beautifully it was made, and by how unusual it now seems for a major film to treat Catholicism quite so seriously.
