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There are many ways to approach The Mission. One is to see it as a hard-won triumph for Producer Fernando Ghia, whose unwavering, fifteen-year struggle to get this film produced parallels Richard Attenborough's commitment to Gandhi. Another way is to concentrate on Director Roland Joffré's continuing efforts to test his skills against the demands of the "well made epic," in the Lean/Zinneman tradition, and to challenge the political conscience of his audience at the same time.
Or, we can regard it as another clear-eyed but compassionate sludy of the processes of revolution and the people caught up in them by playwright/scenarist Robert Bolt. In fact, this essay will argue that the script of The Mission echoes Bolt's other works and his own experiences as it traces the ways realists and romantics respond to revolutionary upheaval.
Certainly, the author of A Man For All Seasons (both the stage and screen versions), the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Bounty, and the plays, Vivat! Vivat! Regina and State of Revolution has spent his career dramatizing revolutionary crises from history for modern audiences.
Bolt sensibly declares that this perisistent theme or focus in his works is the result of circumstances rather than conscious choice. (Bolt, Personal Interview, 1976) but it is also true that circumstances, particularly the revolutionary climate of our era, have prompted a widespread concentration on the same subject especially by popular filmmakers. A Year of Living Dangerously, Gandhi, The Killing Fields, and The Kiss of the Spider Woman are just a lew of the recent movies that have looked at the lives of people swept into the maelstroms of revolutions around the globe. The Mission is fascinated by the same phenomenon, but steps into the past for the special perspective and aesthetic distance history provides.
This particular historical episode deals with the destruction of what has come to be known in South America as The Lost Paradise. The plot, which is presented in a series of flashbacks as Cardinal Altamirano reports by letter to the Vatican, begins near the climax: it is 1756. and representatives of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial authorities have assembled in Asuncion to complete the transfer of territories from the control of Spain to...