‘MISSION’: VIOLENCE IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA

From the opening scene, in which a Jesuit priest tied to a wooden cross plunges over the falls to his death, it is clear that “The Mission” is going to be hard on the missionaries.

Later in the film’s script, a boat filled with Spanish slave hunters is lured over the same falls by wily Indians, so you know it’s also going to be hard on the black hats.

In another scene, the Indians are burned to death by Spanish soldiers in the church they built after becoming friendly with the Jesuits.

So, they’re all losers in this violent look at colonial Spanish America, a subject that English-language films have most often left to Zorro or Francis Drake and other raiders of the Spanish Main. But there are no losers behind the camera.

“The Mission,” a $20-million Goldcrest Ltd. production, is studded with Oscar winners and nominees, including star Robert De Niro (“Raging Bull”), screenwriter Robert Bolt (“Dr. Zhivago”) and director Roland Joffe (“The Killing Fields”).

This logistical nightmare, which weaves its way through the dense Colombian jungles to the Iguazu Falls near Brazil where filming ends next month, examines the relationship between Jesuit missionaries and the Paraguay Indians they were trying to convert and save from slavery.

Bolt describes the story as an examination of one dramatic moment in the missionary history of the Roman Catholic Church and of one of the many social utopias attempted in the New World. De Niro, bearded and wearing shoulder-length hair, simply calls it “a helluva story.”

“This is Beckett with Clint Eastwood effects,” says executive producer David Puttnam (“Chariots of Fire”).

The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, an American Jesuit active in political movements against the Vietnam War and nuclear armament, is making his acting debut in “The Mission.” He plays one of the missionaries.

“This is not just history,” Berrigan says. “The story is relevant to the situation of the church of today in Latin America.”

“The Mission” is the latest in a distinguished line of expensive Goldcrest films (among the British company’s most recent productions: “Gandhi,” “The Killing Fields”).

In the film, De Niro plays a Spanish slave hunter who kills his brother (played by Aidan Quinn (“Reckless,” “Desperately Seeking Susan”) in a quarrel over a woman and then becomes a penitent Jesuit devoted to protecting the Indians he had come to hunt.

Other familiar faces around the wooden mission church here include Jeremy Irons, who plays the voice of non-violent reason, and Ray McAnally, as Cardinal Altamirano, a Vatican emissary concerned with the political activism of priests in South America.

On this level, Berrigan says, “The Mission” parallels contemporary church concerns with pro-Sandanista priests and advocates of “liberation theology” in Central America.

“The Mission” also delves into the sociology of 18th-Century Spanish colonialism, recounting the changes forced on the Guarani Indians by the missionaries.

The Jesuits in Paraguay, and what is now northern Argentina, organized the Guarani Indians into self-sustaining rural villages where modern agriculture was introduced and Indians learned to sing polyphonic chorals. The Jesuits protected the Indians from Spanish and Portuguese slave and gold hunters who roamed the area.

This protected world collapsed when the Jesuits were expelled from the territory by Spain’s King Charles IV. The film dramatizes the events leading up to and following their expulsion.

When he’s not working, De Niro spends much of his time with the 300 Guaunana Indians brought to the current location at the base of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada from their thatched-hut villages along the San Juan River on Colombia’s Pacific Coast.

One of the Guaunana, an Indian boy named Basilio, has become De Niro’s closest friend on the set. The two have gone surfing and boating together, and when Basilio returns home, he’ll have the river’s only boogie board--a gift from De Niro.

There are big differences between the Guaunana actors and the Guranis they portray. Although the Guaunanas are jungle-dwellers, as were the Guarani in colonial days, they had to be taught to use bows and arrows for the film. They customarily hunt with spears.

Neither are they practicing Catholics, so the story of the Jesuits leaves them indifferent.

Still, the destruction of the Indians is something they understand.

“We know what that is; the white men have been our enemies too,” says Barbarito Domisabe, one of the Guaunana leaders.

Domisabe says he thinks that--at the rate of about $6 a day, plus food and lodging--the Indians are being underpaid. That fee was part of a rent-a-tribe deal under which Goldcrest agreed to put up about $100,000 for improvements in the Indian villages.

Underpaid or not, the Guaunanas have kept their end of the bargain.

The crew has been shooting on location in Colombia since February, first in Cartagena, a walled fortress city with stone churches and narrow streets under carved wooden balconies, and then at the jungle site, where a wooden mission was built on the Don Diego River.

“The Mission” began filming in February in Cartagena, a walled fortress city, and wraps next month in the Colombian jungle near the borders of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

Warner Bros. will release the film in the United States late next year, the film makers say. They hope to launch it with a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.