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A Passage to India

(1984)

164 min. Columbia Pictures. Director: David Lean. Cast: Judy Davis, Victor Banerjee, Peggy Ashcroft, James Fox, Alec Guinness.

After a fourteen year absence from the silver screen, David Lean vigorously attacked the challenge of adapting E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India. What would be Lean's final film has much to recommend it: Lean's impeccable epic sensibility (expressed through gorgeous scenery and elegant compositions), a lush Maurice Jarre score, weighty themes, and an assured cinematic treatment of the most difficult problem of adaptation—the visual depiction of the mysterious incident at the Marabar Caves. But Lean's film presents challenges of its own: a directorially frustrated perfomance by Indian actor Victor Banerjee in a primary role and the inextricable, accurately perceived leaning (in opposition to Forster) to the British point of view.

Along those lines, there's also the matter of Lean's old-school casting of British icon Alec Guinness as "the inscrutable Brahman" Narayan Godbole. Lean's adaptation of Forster and the play version of the novel by Santha Rama Rau is clearly a labor of love (Lean would earn three of the film's eleven Oscar nominations, for writing, directing, and editing the film), and the film's stateliness has its own kind of old-world charm. Furthermore, it's not as if the story lacks sympathy for India under Britain's imperial rule—racism and hypocrisy and the wide gulf between the classes are all themes Lean clearly acknowledges.

The story, set in 1926, concerns Adela Quested (Judy Davis), who travels for the first time out of England in the company of her fiancé's mother, one Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft, who would win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar). The fiancé, a British magistrate in India named Ronny Heaslop (Nigel Havers), lives above it all, having as little contact with the natives as is possible. Miss Quested, however, shows a native curiosity; not content to sit around a country club, she accepts the invitations of Dr. Aziz H. Ahmed (Banerjee) to see more of the land, including the Marabar Caves. The caves represent the mysteries of existence and sexuality: a small dose of their echoes prompts "old soul" Mrs. Moore to reflect, "I suppose, like many old people, I sometimes think we are merely passing figures in a godless universe."

When Dr. Aziz and Miss Quested become separated from a group of travelers and then briefly from each other, accident, sexual fantasy, and reality converge to create the conditions for tragic misunderstanding. Aziz finds himself railroaded for rape, and Quested remains unsure what to do with herself, her personal erotic awakening having failed to materialize with one man and having guiltily imploded with another. The case becomes a cause célèbre and a rallying cry for the protest against imperialism. Dignitary Mr. Turton (Richard Wilson) invokes Kipling's old chestnut "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," and he may be right, despite the efforts at friendship by Aziz and professor Richard Fielding (James Fox).

Unsettlingly, Lean encouraged Banerjee to play up his "Indian-ness" to a degree that sometimes approaches cartoonishness, while the director allowed Davis to underplay at a low simmer. Guinness acquits himself admirably as the exasperating philosophy professor whose seemingly superficial judgements and brusque manner belie a profound awareness, but his brownface is discomfiting by the late date of 1984 (Guinness and Lean had fielded similar criticism thirty-five years before when the actor played Fagin as a Semitic caricature in Lean's Oliver Twist). Despite such cause for hesitancy, Lean's visually appealing film frequently connects as a social satire and a mystical melodrama of transgressors looking for footholds in psychically threatening territory.

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