Film
Seitz, Michael H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz A Shallow Passage During his lifetime, E. M. Forster refused all requests for the rights to make a movie of his 1924 novel, A Passage to India. But the Cambridge University...
...Old Mrs...
...But these roles have all been severely cut in the movie, and their conversations deleted...
...Telling use is made of archival visuals and family snapshots, but the greater part of the film was shot over a three-year period in Brooklyn and in Israel...
...The central focus is on an immigrant survivor, Zoltan Klein, and his troubled and unusually articulate son, Yossi...
...Moore's son Ronny (Nigel Havers), a local colonial magistrate...
...Accordingly, he has invented a scene just before this climactic episode in which Quested comes upon an abandoned temple embellished with erotic sculpture, is both attracted and repelled by this spectacle, and is frightened off by a group of screeching monkeys...
...In the novel, conversations among Aziz and his Muslim friends lend a uniquely Indian perspective on the British Raj and induce us to pay serious attention to the nationalist cause...
...Fielding comes to the aid of Quested, who is now an outcast among the English colonials, and this gesture disrupts his friendship with Aziz...
...I suspect it might terrify young children...
...An impassioned brief for animal rights is presented as the story of two dogs escaped from a sinister research laboratory...
...The novel begins in Chandrapore with the sociopolitical banter of Aziz and his friends...
...One warning: This is adult-level material...
...But the defects are at least partly overcome by marvelously Hopperesque imagery and lighting, which make this a most interesting-looking movie...
...On the stand, however, Quested repudiates her initial deposition and insists Aziz was never in the cave with her...
...Lean tacks on a happy ending in which personal and, by implication, national resentments are neatly resolved...
...Despite an almost total lack of evidence, the official English community, except for Fielding, closes ranks and conspires to convict the defendant...
...Lean fabricates a beginning in England, so that he can have Mrs...
...Moore and Miss Quested arrive in Bombay, along with the Viceroy, to a spectacular display of the full pomp and pageantry of the British Raj...
...He also seems to h^ve a lingering nostalgia for the British imperial past...
...Forster would almost certainly have been dissatisfied with Lean's achievement, as will be those who treasure the novel's subtle insights and the sense of mystery that lies at its heart...
...The scene itself is striking, but its insertion just before the expedition to Marabar converts Forster's tantalizing ambiguity into a simple case of sexual hysteria...
...In like manner, Lean has diminished the role of Professor Godbole, Forster's Hindu mystic and the only major Hindu character in the novel...
...Kit Carson, and further adapted and interpreted by German director Wim Wenders...
...The director has claimed to know exactly what happened to Quested in the Marabar cave...
...she wanders into a cave, something happens, and she flees in a state of hysteria...
...In the course of this outing, Quested finds herself alone— perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not—with Aziz...
...The first half is enthralling, but the second half is seriously flawed...
...The social and thematic balance of Forster's work is further disturbed by the film's reduced emphasis on the Indian presence...
...The script seems to have been worked over by too many hands (an original screenplay by dramatist Sam Shepard, adapted by L.M...
...But it does not approach the quality of Forster's novel, nor does it preserve the book's stylistic and thematic integrity...
...M Hits and Misses Kaddish An extraordinarily moving and deeply probing documentary investigation of the legacy of the Holocaust...
...It is not that A Passage to India is a bad movie...
...Aziz (Victor Banerjee), carried away by the euphoria of the moment, invites the party to a picnic at the Marabar caves...
...Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) and young Adela Quested (Judy Davis), hoping to see something of "the real India," come to visit the British Raj enclave of Chandrapore...
...Subsidiary themes include the transmission of historical consciousness and the relationship of fathers and sons...
...In its graphics, thematic depth, and avoidance of sentimentality, this is a notably daring work...
...What is most troubling, however, is Lean's transformation of the novel's ending...
...The screenplay is simplistically schematic and the motivation of young Nazi recruits is superficially depicted, but this is a strongly felt work, and it has some genuinely shocking moments—even for American viewers...
...it is visually opulent, exquisitely costumed, finely acted, and endowed with some splendidly literate dialogue (the most memorable portions of which have been lifted verbatim from the book...
...The British sahibs disdain social contact with the natives, so it is only at a small gathering arranged by Fielding (James Fox), a maverick Englishman, that the two women begin to break out of the colonial cocoon...
...But the Cambridge University executors of his estate finally relented, and the result is the current adaptation by British filmmaker David Lean (Great Expectations, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago...
...Paris, Texas A drama of emotional desolation, ruptured communication, and the search for family, set firmly within the contemporary American landscape...
...It is, in other words, like Chariots of Fire and Gandhi, a large-scale, handsomely crafted, conventionally realized work, destined to attract swarms of middle-brow moviegoers and win Academy Awards...
...Forster concluded that the rifts separating East and West are at least temporarily irreconcilable...
...Nastasia Kinski hurts the film whenever she speaks, though Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell give superb performances and have the first hour to themselves...
...At two performances I attended, the audience tittered whenever he appeared on the screen...
...The Plague Dogs An animated feature-length film by Martin Rosen (Watership Down), based on the novel by Richard Adams...
...The Inheritors An Austrian dramatization of the disturbing emergence of contemporary neo-Na-zism...
...But other scenes that Lean concocts or transforms undermine the balance and coherence of Forster's work...
...The film cuts crucial expressions of Godbole's philosophy, leaving Alec Guinness, who is a bit too recognizably Alec Guinness in this role, nothing to work with but little bits of comic business...
...His nationalist supporters celebrate his vindication, a humiliating blow to British authority...
...Quested is about to become engaged to Mrs...
...Thus we are left with Aziz alone, and with teeming hordes of Indians in crowd scenes and bit parts, all amusingly exotic or clownish...
...Moore and Aziz in a deserted mosque, the scenic train trips to Chandra-pore and Marabar, the colorful, elephant-led procession to the caves...
...A Passage to India is a handsome entertainment, but it is not a fine adaptation of a great literary work, nor is it great cinema in its own right...
...Time after time, Lean translates Forster's subtle effects into gross and glaringly obvious signals...
...This celebration of colonial splendor conflicts with the anticolonial thrust of the novel, but Lean has an almost indiscriminate penchant for dramatic visual effects...
...Upon his return from the expedition, the bewildered Aziz is arrested and charged with attempted rape...
...One of the guests, the Muslim Dr...
...Lean's adaptation admirably reproduces a number of the novel's more picturesque scenes—the nocturnal encounter of Mrs...
...The film retains most of the basic elements of Forster's narrative...
Vol. 49 • March 1985 • No. 3
