Davin Lean's Predictable 'Passage'
MERKIN, DAPHNE
On Screen DAVID LEAN'S PREDICTABLE 'PASSAGE' BY DAPHNE MERKIN A Passage to India plows forward like one of those great ocean liners of days past, its captain firmly at the helm and all the...
...Lean is at his magisterial best in handling these vivid courtroom scenes, avoiding the unrealistically antic...
...I wasn't...
...he knows how to mount a production...
...The virtue of such a movie is the way it spares the viewer anxiety: Those In The Know have carefully planned our trip to circumnavigate trouble spots and unpleasant surprises...
...But something about her physical being—perhaps her voluptuous mouth and unabashed, wide gray eyes —undermines the repressed quality that is an important aspect of Miss Quested's personality...
...Willing to take on the Establishment, Fielding is ultimately too horrified by fuss or mess to get involved wholeheartedly in anything...
...She manages to convey the character's sterling spirit —the intuitive empathy that leads Aziz to dub Mrs...
...The near comical panoply surrounding the trip, including the baskets upon baskets of food, suggests the desperate yearning and anxiety inspiring the doctor's overtures to his guests...
...Banerjee does have the liquid gaze and nervous, overexpressive movements you would expect in the high-strung dreamer of a physician...
...Lean's opening scene, appended onto the original narrative, gives him a chance to strut his wide-screen, full-tilt-ahead stuff...
...Bleeding and confused, Adela runs away, eventually meeting a carload of her countrymen, who indignantly accept her sexual hallucinations...
...Moore, meanwhile, has died on the ship that was taking her back to England, having been hurried out of India by Ronny before she could testify...
...Yet it is the caves themselves, full of nihilistic echoes ("because," Forster writes, "a Marabar cave can hear no sound but its own"), that end Aziz' dream of universal brotherhood...
...Peggy Ashcroft breathes life into the nondescript figure of Mrs...
...She is simply too stirring to portray a virgin on her way to spinster-hood...
...There is an uneasy stirring as this point is subtly yet firmly driven home, an unwelcome reminder to the arrogant British that these colonial wards have standards and tastes of their own...
...Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) and her young traveling companion, Adela Quested (Judy Davis), have arrived in India...
...Ashcroft (equally wondrous in an entirely different role, the wallflowerish Barbie in Public Television's The Jewel in the Crown) is among those rare, truly inspired actresses able to make her presence felt indirectly...
...In Chandrapore Mrs...
...Mrs...
...Moore's first husband, Ronny's father—as if, under the surface, they have everything in common...
...Moore, unmindful of her son's admonitions that the British must keep their distance from the people, soon visits a mosque to escape a night's drudgery at the officers' club...
...Moore "an oriental"—and the grouchy, put-upon behavior of an aging lady who no longer feels any need to accommodate foolishness...
...he has flashes of coolness, of ironic detachment...
...He talks to the single British administrator willing to treat Indians as peers—Fielding (James Fox), the principal of the local Government College—and then arranges an ambitious expedition to the celebrated Marabar Caves...
...The trial pits Indians noisily demanding justice against the stiff-necked, formal British, a contrast that dramatizes the gulf dividing the rulers and the ruled...
...Who could better direct so regal an undertaking than David Lean—the man with the seasoned epic touch, the guiding spirit of The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivagol At age 76 Lean has a lot of experience under his belt...
...Although Guinness raises his eyebrows wildly and ducks coyly behind his high turban, recalling Peter Sellers "doing" an Oriental, I'm not sure the book did any better by this symbol of mystic impenetrability...
...Even dampened down, squashed beneath pale makeup and layers of clothing, her looks are indubitably there: It is hard to believe that this Adela is considered too plain to arouse the interest of Dr...
...The proceedings culminate in Adela's retraction of her complaint, a courageous act that wins her the animosity of each culture...
...One now expects the movie to end, but instead it lingers a bit awkwardly...
...Moore retreats in terror following her exposure to the first of them, deciding to wait outside while Adela, the doctor and a guide press onward...
...Thus the film closes on an atmosphere of subdued kindness all around that is literally faithful to For-ster's narrative...
...The flaw, of course, is that the approach leaves hardly any room for ambiguity or incompletion: The ship, whatever distractions it may encounter, must sail on...
...On Screen DAVID LEAN'S PREDICTABLE 'PASSAGE' BY DAPHNE MERKIN A Passage to India plows forward like one of those great ocean liners of days past, its captain firmly at the helm and all the havoc of the voyage kept graciously below deck...
...Notwithstanding these deficiencies, a lot of the movie's essentials have been handled well—notably the casting of several key figures...
...Judy Davis, the freckle-sprinkled heroine of My Brilliant Career, is a deft Adela...
...Moore, filling out contours that Forster merely hinted at...
...I found myself missing Mrs...
...Aziz, a volatile physician with the wistful soul of a poet, is eager to show off the country to his new acquaintance and her friend...
...replies a scandalized Ronny...
...Moore's son, Ronny (Nigel Havers), the City Magistrate and intended husband of Adela, meets the visitors, who watch in astonishment as their fellow-passengers, the Turtons, receive an official military welcome...
...Mrs...
...In fact, considering that the sensibilities of David Lean and E.M...
...It would not have surprised me to see him lie down and heel, if necessary, to please his British guests...
...Aziz...
...There she encounters Dr...
...Moore, Adela proceeds to accuse her generous and pathetically well-intentioned host of assault from her sickbed in Chandra-pore...
...For-ster's 1924 novel himself...
...If anyone is to be blamed for this spot of caricature, it is probably the author...
...The story's major conflict—the disconnection of East and West—is symbolized by Ronny's proper and rigid "sahib" behavior, on the one hand, and the women's (to him) naive desire to understand, rather than merely disdain, Indian customs, on the other...
...Two English ladies, the elderly Mrs...
...A particularly telling episode has the doctor's lawyer, an Indian who has waived his ordinarily large fees to take the case, implying that to his countrymen the injury of Miss Quested's charge is compounded by the insult of its coming from an unattractive source...
...The one perf ormance that truly troubled me was Victor Banerjee's Dr...
...The result is very much Lean's version of Forster's version of British rule in India—yet faithful, in its way...
...Moore after her death in much the same way I would miss someone I had grown fond of in real life who had died...
...Moore remarks mildly to her son in a moment of ironically presented misunderstanding...
...James Fox is suitably bemused playing the lucid Fielding, Forster's stand-in for himself...
...one has the feeling of watching the screen through panes of glass...
...she works on the imagination, leaving the audience with a glowing afterimage...
...The director's style resembles Forster's less than it mimics the mentality of the British officials he described: Imperial and decisive, it has our best interests at heart and imposes them on us...
...But to understand what Forster was getting at you have to go back to his irresolute, mercurial novel—where "the shadow of the shadow of a dream" keeps falling over the "clear-cut interests" that continually separate the conquerors and the conquered...
...To quote Forster, "Like most orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession...
...Moore's daughter, and tries to patch up his old friendship with Aziz...
...A short time later the young woman emerges hysterically, convinced that Aziz has tried to rape her...
...He apparently has a good deal of energy, too, for in addition to directing, he adapted E.M...
...Disembarking in a crowded and opulently colorful Bombay, the newcomers are escorted to a train that takes them to the provincial city of Chandra-pore...
...I'd no idea he was so important," Mrs...
...The quality it lacks is the quick intimacy of the novelist's tone, his technique of seeming to cock his head at the reader, soliciting opinions...
...Forster don't really seem to be in tune with each other, the movie is remarkably faithful to its model in letter if not in spirit...
...He is so pliant a creature, it comes as something of a shock to find him capable of resisting any proposal by someone like Fielding, albeit only temporarily...
...I found it distinctly contrary, though, to the novel's subtly negative final note: The horses the two men are riding swerve apart, and in a poignant answer to Fielding's plea for amity the surrounding landscape is said to murmur, "No, not yet" and "No, not there...
...His mistake is playing the part almost entirely for its wooing, puppylike potential...
...Aziz (Victor Banerjee...
...Watching, you are bound to feel awed by the foresight and care that have gone into this grandly conceived vehicle...
...Moore and Adela all to himself...
...Abandoning all semblance of understanding, much less harmony, the British and Indian communities cease to veil their enmity with cordiality or good intentions...
...Davis' acting skill, however, renders my reservations immaterial in the crucial trial scene, which reveals Adela's triumphant spineyness, her determination not to let pride suppress conscience...
...Further encouraged by all her British acquaintances except Mrs...
...They discuss their children and the deaths of their respective spouses—the doctor's late young wife and Mrs...
...The rest of the film chronicles the disruptive effects of that calumny...
...The Aziz I recall in Forster is hardly that abjectly eager for approval, that ready to be a subject of our scrutiny...
...Aziz...
...Aside from the accompanying servants, therefore, the nervous Aziz has Mrs...
...After he is calmed by her assurance that she has indeed respected the sanctity of the holy place and taken off her shoes before coming inside, the two start an immediately natural conversation...
...A flashforward introduces a scene a few years later, when Fielding visits India with his wife, Mrs...
...Fielding is supposed to come along as a sort of neutralizing agent, but he fails to show up in time to catch the train...
...lean's not unabsorbing film is long (over two and a half hours), stately and curiously remote...
...Several reviewers were deeply bothered by the farcical use, or misuse, of Alec Guinness in the role of Professor Godbole, a quixotic Indian scholar...
...The trip provides their first taste of the condescension that marks the British attitude toward the native society...
...You didn't...
Vol. 67 • December 1984 • No. 23
