Belizaire - O Proscrito

When I was a teenager in Baton Rouge, La. in 1986, I saw a large newspaper ad for this movie, Belizaire the Cajun, in my local paper, the Morning Advocate (now simply The Advocate). Among the critics that praised the movie in the ad was one David Foil who wrote his full-length reviews that appeared every Friday in the FUN section every week. I don't remember him having one of this in any FUN section but the fact that this got such a large ad in our paper obviously meant that this was a very important movie for Louisiana citizens based on the subject matter and the fact that the filmmaker, writer/director Glen Pitre, came from the state. Having now seen Belizaire the Cajun 21 years after its original release, I can now say what an awesome drama about the Cajuns and their struggles against the prejudice of certain white Americans who settled in The Pelican State, this is. Armand Assante plays the title character, who is a healer of various illnesses, with such a sense of humor and pride in his heritage that you're with him all the way with his attitudes on various peoples that upset him. Among them are Will Patton as the father of the children of Gail Youngs who has a history with Assante, and Stephen McHattie who is Patton's brother-in-law and seems to hate Assante and his people even more than Patton. Michael Schoeffling, best known as Molly Ringwald's crush Jake Ryan in Sixteen Candles, plays a cousin of Assante's who gets in trouble. And someone related to director Pitre named Loulan plays the sheriff. Plus there's a cameo by Robert Duvall, who helped get this film made, as a preacher. All of the performances I've just mentioned plus others are excellent as well as the Cajun music played by Michael Doucet and Beausoleil. Without giving anymore away, I'll just say the cliché, you'll laugh and cry and possibly think of how far we've come culturally a century or so since those times. And maybe hope to find someone to dance to the wonderful Cajun music that's presented here...

BELIZAIRE THE CAJUN is a trickster's tale. Belizaire (Armand Assante) is a healer and community leader who is standing against a displacement of a small Cajun settlement in rural Louisiana that is being led by "good white citizens" like Old Perry (Ernie Vincent), his reluctant son Matthew (Will Patton), and his obnoxious gung-ho vigilante son-in-law, James Willoughby (Stephen McHattie). Matthew Perry is a torn personality, as he has "gone native" with a beautiful Cajun woman Alida Thibodeaux (Gail Youngs) and is the father of her son and a child she is pregnant with. Belizaire nurses an old love for Alida, and this is a source of tension between he and Matthew that the surrounding community is aware of.

In addition to this conflict, there is an underlying problem between Matthew Perry and his brother-in-law Willoughby, who seeks to run the Perry plantation, but is distrusted by both Old Perry and his daughter Rebecca (Nancy Barrett). Beyond these issues, there are the problems engendered for the Cajun settlement by the mischief of petty raiders like Hypolite Leger (Michael Schoeffling), a man whose own family has been displaced by earlier seizures of Cajun land and livestock.

Before the story is over, Matthew Perry is dead, Belizaire winds up charged with his murder, and a lot of wheeling and dealing is done under the auspice of a Machiavellian sheriff (Loulan Pitre) and the parish priest (Allan Durand), all of which is brought to closure during a most amusing hanging scene that marks the climax of the work. With BELIZAIRE THE CAJUN, film maker Glen Pitre gives us a trickster's tale that is steeped in a little known chapter of United States history. And that chapter, which is as "all-American" as the white-led anti-black riots in St. Louis during the First World War and the U.S. led massacre at My Lai in Vietnam, is a semi-fictional chronicle of the harassment of the Arcadian (or Cajun) peoples of Southwest Louisiana in the years before the Civil War. It's a story that bears telling, and Pitre and his cast pull it off with a lot of humor as well as a "no foolin'" tone. The beautiful soundtrack provided by Cajun musicians Beausoleil adds depth and atmosphere. BELIZAIRE THE CAJUN is a "ringer" to be sure.

This is a very good film for those who only think that American History is only about American Independence, Civil War and Cowboy's and Indians. There are many more stories to be told about America like the Cajuns, the American/Mexican war, American Indians and not just slavery of African-Americans. I agree that this film is may not be very sophisticated, action packed and the story line is relatively easy to predict. But, all that aside, Asante does a very good job and shows his talent in attempting to play a cultural role that he is not. His attempt to act "Cajun" and attempt to speak the Cajun dialect underlines his acting ability. This film is very underrated only because it is not very well know. There are not enough films about our culture and this film is a good starting point. It is amazing that no other film attempts, since 1986, to tell the story of the persecution of the Cajuns/Creole culture in the South during this time period. I know that this does not compare to the persecution of the African-American slaves during the same period, but it does attempt to show the similarities. And, if you go to the real Cajun Country today(not New Orleans), you will enjoy the brotherhood, hospitality and friendliness that is comparable to none.

BELEZAIRE THE CAJUN is a film with a major problem. It tries to tell about a rather obscure part of American history (and THAT kills a mass market box office hook to get 'em into the theaters), and it tries to tell the story in an accurate, realistic way that doesn't whitewash some of the darker aspects of America's past. John Sayle's film MATEWAN did the same thing, and has exactly the same problems... and like MATEWAN, BELEZAIRE THE CAJUN is a deep, intense, and INTELLIGENT film which demands an intelligent audience. There's a big difference between the two films tho; BELEZAIRE tells it's story with a large dose of HUMOR along with the serious realities.

In short... people either LOVE the film, or they HATE it. I'm on the LOVE side.

Unless you lived in Cajun country, it's probable that you never learned anything about thier history or culture in school. To those of us who didn't, the film is a painless and interesting introduction... for me, it opened a door for further exploration. Up to BELEZAIRE THE CAJUN, the only exposure I'd had to this culture was an insane Cajun drill sergeant at Lackland Air Force Base... and suffice it to say that HE wasn't a strong inducement to further exploration of the subject! Just the same tho, BELEZAIRE had the effect of giving me a bit of understanding of where old Sergeant Cormier was coming from culturally, and long after the fact I understood him just a bit better.

An awful lot of us don't realize that Cajuns were, and ARE, a discriminated against minority in America. Learning that alone is worth the time to see the film. Besides that lesson, we get a pretty good overview of Cajun life and culture in the period. We see a fiercely independent people who accepted thier isolation from the American society at large and did so proudly, building thier own society within the American one, deep in the Louisiana bayous.

As I said... this is a film that you either hate or love, but I'd recommend it strongly.

Belizaire the Cajun sates my movie palate on every viewing, with a rich gumbo of music, smartly comic characters, romance, and social passions. The community's herbalist healer, Belizaire (Armand Assante), does all he can to defend his friends from vigilantes threatening to banish or hang them. Compromise is not in his nature, but bargaining is. The resulting passion play reveals the tangle of power in the community.

Belizaire is as fun to watch as The Lion In Winter, and more uplifting, because its motivations include love and justice, in addition to power and intrigue. Relationships in movies are rarely as real as in Belizaire the Cajun, so I especially recommend it to reality TV fans.