A PAINLESS PASSAGE
O'Brien, Tom
Screen LEAN PICKINGS A PAINLESS PASSAGE DAVID LEAN is, in one precise way, a great filmmaker; A Passage to India is not a great film. Fine, yes, but currently it's riding a wave of excessive...
...However, it takes just the right dose of madness to animate such a method...
...We are left with a puzzle about Aziz: did he or didn't he...
...From England arrive two bored romantics, with equally appropriate symbolic names, Ronnie's mother Mrs...
...Unfortunately, Lean's efforts to convey the first inflection of the symbol seem minimal...
...no one draws such a moral, and the contrived happy end defeats it...
...In Lean's film, despite some initial, memorable shots of "raj" architecture in Bombay, we soon hunker down to the familiar: fussy imperial types with dancing mustaches, their high falutin' wives in flowing silks, and young sahibs (principally one with the genuinely crusty name of Ronnie Heaslop), who have grown stiff upper lips from sneering at the darkies...
...on the last leg, having left Mrs...
...Lean's masterpieces with mad characters draw on his ' 'bow-wow strain...
...WHAT HAPPENS...
...A Passage to India is not a grand romantic tale loaded with action and extremist psychology...
...Forster's A Passage to India is a complex, dark melodrama of manners, with an added mystic tinge, and here Lean's style seems too open, too declarative, too epic...
...Lean's style, unfortunately, is as magisterial as the British empire satirized by Forster...
...We could do with a few films on India, to be sure — on the Sikhs, for example, or Bhopal — for there is far more to the subcontinent than the "raj" period of British rule, especially when it is seen through British eyes...
...Lean's power is superficial in both the best and worst senses of the word: he's a brilliant cinematographer, perhaps even a genius at photography...
...TOM O'BRIEN 8 February 1985: 85...
...He's the embodiment of the cultured man caught between invaders and natives...
...Of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, Scott wrote: ' "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which to me is the most wonderful I ever met with...
...Lean's overwrought version of Forster's "boom" is curried mysticism on the cheap, hardly Commonweal: 84 helped by miscasting Alec Guiness in the role of a Hindu sage, Professor Godbole...
...Give Lean a camera and he soon composes — with filmic magic, majesty, sweep, and scope — sights to take your breath away...
...She has an elfin face, uneven lips that seem in permanent motion with some slight bemusement, and, initially at least, a hat that triangulates the camera frame in close imitation of Ingrid Bergman's at the close of Casablanca...
...According to Lean, "as far as I know, no one has succeeded in putting India on screen," a statement which indicates, at best, he has never seen Satyajit Ray...
...At one point, the hero (sort of), an Indian named Doctor Aziz, reflects on the crucial event of the plot, and asks a listener, "Why should we care that much if one English girl got too much of the sun...
...Forster makes you care...
...with a warm-blooded Russian base in Doctor Zhivago...
...or with the desert Faustianism of Lawrence of Arabia), Lean finds stories which match his style — stories deep enough to balance and enrich, with real emotive power, his stately visual cadences...
...What the book needed in order to come across in film was someone who could combine a vivid visual sense with a more delicate, interiorized viewpoint...
...For this, perhaps, we are indebted to Lean's photographic genius, albeit slightly misplaced...
...Taken as a whole, Lean's defects in A Passage to India remind me of Walter Scott's...
...On the other hand, Lean does convey the second theme — the spiritual significance of the caves' echo — all too heavy-handedly, with camera placements and sound effects that make sure we understand how important it was...
...If only he had been the main focus, A Passage to India would have drive as well as sweep...
...Fine, yes, but currently it's riding a wave of excessive adulation based on nostalgia for the kind of old cinematic style Lean so mastered in the 1940s and '50s...
...Peggy Ashcroft, as Mrs...
...Shortly after, we see her running from one of the caves in terror, claiming Aziz assaulted her, a claim she later recants during a trial — too late to save Ronnie and the English community from acute embarrassment...
...In the high arts, in particular, you can't fool all the people all the time, but an English accent sure helps...
...Moore, confused and upset by her visit to the first cave, flees India before the trial, and dies while hearing some kind of cosmic sonic boom while sailing around Cape Horn...
...Lean doesn't...
...Indeed, not much happens: maybe a rape, then a trial that peters out (true to Forster's modernist Zeitgeist, ' 'not with a bang but a whimper...
...Of course, Lean is not entirely external in his focus...
...But Australian actress Judy Davis (formerly of My Brilliant Career) provides the most consistent point of interest as Adela Quested...
...The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself . . . but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and sentiment, is denied to me...
...Moore behind, she speaks politely but intimately to Aziz about his wife, who had died recently...
...Moore and his intended, Adela Quested, both hungry for adventure with the real India...
...We can catch the psychology of bold gestures: Peter O'Toole blowing out the match near the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, or later, a la Gordon Liddy, enfolding one...
...It remains a mystery...
...Forster provided some interesting angles on the problem — in 1922, that is — but they seem tedious now...
...It's the kind of film to see when you need something intelligent to hear and beautiful to eye...
...But there are no bold gestures in Forster...
...Moore, successfully manages the thankless job of turning from searcher to old crank and still compels our pity...
...Indeed, as Indian novelist Salman Rushdie points out about the praise for A Passage to India, anglophilia seduces us into taking seriously the unbelievable proposition that the key elements in Anglo-Indian relations can be represented by the rape of an English woman...
...E.M...
...When the story he is telling is demonic (out of Dickens, say, in Great Expectations and Oliver Twist...
...Aziz proposes a trip to the nearby Marabar caves, and thereby hangs the tale...
...Victor Bannerjee, a leading Indian actor, plays Dr...
...alternately, as some Forster critics suggest, the trip symbolizes a kind of universal unknowability about the purpose and meaning of life itself...
...It just doesn't move...
...Forster's symbolism is at best implicit in the film...
...But Scott recognized them in words which, perhaps, provide a final verdict on Lean's film...
...Quested, somewhat overheated by finding erotic statuary and then fighting with her fiance, gets closer to the doctor as they make their day trek to the caves...
...But a different response claims that it doesn't matter — that the trip to the caves symbplizes one culture's inability to grasp the truth about another...
...Nevertheless, the other principal actors do an excellent job in keeping A Passage to India afloat — even during some of the scene-setting "raj" sequences — in managing to keep boredom from becoming boring...
...Only Forster knew for sure...
...Both Moore and Quested befriend the young Indian Doctor Aziz, nervous but pleasant, anxious to please and to impress his "superiors...
...Perhaps the popularity of such pap in America is simply due to our colonialism...
...A Passage to India gives it inadequate outlet...
...Far more than most other directors, he delves beyond guiding actors and shaping story to the specifically visual content of his films...
...But what of Gandhi, Heat and Dust, HBO's The Far Pavilions, and The Jewel in the Crown, that current hit of the leading American entertainment network, Granada Television...
...Aziz, and perfectly catches his mercurial range of emotions: ingratiating humility, ambition, and finally, in the film's best scene, revengeful anger...
...It's an anti-romance where even dementia comes off confused, not zany...
...Perhaps an additional problem of the film, for me at least, is the overfamiliarity of the theme: the Anglo-Indian culture clash...
Vol. 112 • February 1985 • No. 3
