"A PASSAGE TO INDIA, UNLOOS'D DREAMS"
by
Pauline Kael

Page 2

Page 1 | 2

Forster's plot is a very elaborate shell game: in the book, just when you think the nugget of truth about Miss Quested's accusation has been located Forster evades you again. He's very lordly, in his way; it's a cosmic comedy--each group of players has its own God. (The inscrutable Hindus, with their policy of self-removal, are wittier than the British Christians, with their disdain. The Muslims are anxious.) Lean isn't as playful, but he has his own form of lordliness. He knows how to do pomp and the moral hideousness of empire better than practically anybody else around. He enlarges the scale of Forster's irony, and the characters live in more sumptuous settings than we might have expected. But they do live. Lean knows how to give the smallest inflections an overpowering psychological weight. The actors don't sink under it.

Lean's control--a kind of benign precision--is very satisfying here, because of the performers (and the bright-colored, fairy-tale vividness of the surroundings). By the time he gets to the trial, everything has been pre-pared, and, in a departure from Forster's mode, he delivers suspense, drama, excitement. The courtroom scenes are far more climactic than in the novel, but Lean has necessarily shaped the material to his own strengths. This isn't the Passage to India that Satyajit Ray hoped to make-though he, too, wanted Victor Banerjee to play Dr. Aziz (and he had met with Peggy Ashcroft). And perhaps Ray might have been able to convey the spiritual grace that Forster was reaching for. But Lean's picture is intelligent and en-joyable, and if his technique is to simplify and to spell everything out in block letters, this kind of clarity has its own formal strength. It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it's like a well-cared-for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this Passage to India is awfully good, until the last half hour or so. Having built up to the court-room dama, Lean isn't able to regain a narrative flow when it's over. The emotional focus is gone, the tension has snapped, and the picture disinte-grates. The concluding scenes, in which he follows the general plan of the book, wobble all over the place. But by then we're pretty well satisfied anyway, and we don't mind staying a little longer with these actors, even though they seem lost.

The cast is just about irreproachable, with the exception of Guinness, who's simply in the wrong movie. The presence of Victor, Banerjee makes you feel embarrassed for Guinness. It's dangerous for an actor to try that Peter Sellers-Indian routine when he's next to the real thing. (You keep ex-pecting Guinness to break into a soft-shoe or do something silly with his turban.) As Dr. Aziz, the slim, compact Banerjee, with his handsome, delicately modeled face (the round eyes, the cupid’s-bow mouth), belongs to this society–he’s like a piece of erotic sculpture, a sensual cherub. When he gets ready to go out, he puts a black liner under his eyes with a swift, prac-ticed motion; he makes the most of his beauty. This soft-voiced Bengali actor is more fluid emotionally than anyone else in the cast; Dr. Aziz’s feelings of generosity, servility, hurt, and rage slide into each other, and we get the im-pression that this is what trying to please the British has done to the man. He's too easily hurt; he's all exposed nerves and excitability. He's the most "human" of the characters, because he's so far from being like the English--and the more he tries to be like them, the farther away he is.

As Miss Quested, Judy Davis has none of the bloom that she had in My Brilliant Career-- she's pale and a trace remote–repression has given her a slightly slugged quality about the eyes. But she's still very attractive in Western terms. Her broad-rimmed hats and virginal, straight-cut dresses are simple and uncoquettish. You like watching her–she has an unusual physical quiet, and her mouth is very expressive (despite the brick-colored lipstick she wears throughout). And it's clear that India represents her first chance to live. She longs for adventure, though she's frightened of it. And she's drawn to Dr. Aziz, though she doesn't know how to get closer to him. So it isn't until the trial that we register that to the Indians she looks tall, flat-chested. and sex-ually undesirable. To them the charge of attempted rape is something of an insult to Dr. Aziz's taste. All along, there's a lascivious fear that runs through the proper behavior of the British fear of India's voluptuous erotic tradi-tions. And Lean has interpolated a sequence that makes this unmistakable: alone on a bicycle ride, Miss Quested chances upon an overgrown park with a temple covered with statuary--coupling bodies. She's fascinated, and as she walks about looking at what the statues are doing she seems transformed---awakened and beautiful. But the statues are suddenly swarming--a bunch of chattering, screeching monkeys come down to the bottom of the temple and onto the statues. They're like little demons blending with the lovers, and thev charge at Miss Quested, terrifying her, and chase her as she rides away on her bike. This dramatization of Miss Quested's fear of sex is very, effective. (It's actually more affective than the major episode of Marabar.) But we can feel its function: it’s to cue us for her hysteria at the caves, and that's not how Forster's material works. (Lean gives us a pointed reminder of the temple scene when Miss, Quested is on her way to the courthouse and a man in a monkey suit jumps on the running board. This is a real blunder; for a second, it throws us out of the movie.) But Judy Davis’s performance is close to perfection: her last scene (in England) is a little skewed, but that's no more than a flyspeck. Despite her moment of hysteria, this Miss Quested is a heroically honest figure who, in testifying as she does at the trial, escapes being raped of her soul by Ronny and the British colonial community.

As Mrs. Moore, Peggy Ashcroft comes through with a piece of transcendent acting. She has to, because Mrs. Moore is meant to be a saint, a sage, a woman in tune with the secrets of eternity. Forster never devised anything for her to do; in the novel, she simply is a sacred being–she’s an enigma, like Professor Godbole. It may have been in an attempt to convey her wisdom that Lean gave he what is probably the worst line in the script: "India forces one to come face to face with oneself. It can be rather disturbing." (Substitute "Transylvania," and that a line for Dracula to speak.) Except for Mrs. Moore’s brief rapport with Aziz, who tells her she has the kindest face he has ever seen on an English lad, she’s simply a weary, practical-minded woman who’s very sure of things. She’s not much of a mother–she’s quite out of sympathy with her son Ronny–and she ahs no particular feeling for Miss Quested. She’s a cantankerous old lady, yet Peggy Ashcroft breathes so much good sense into the role that Mrs. Moore acquires a radiance, a spiritual glow. It makes us like her. Fielding, the character who behaves most courageously, doesn’t seem to have stirred Forster’s imagination much; Forster was probably too much like Fielding for Fielding to interest him. The character is always on the verge of being too decent, but James Fox (he was the weakling master turned slavey in The Servant) gives the part a doggedness that saves it.

The novel wants to be about unresolvability; the movie doesn’t, and isn’t. What’s remarkable about the film is how two such different temperaments as Forster’s and Lean’s could come together. There’s a tie that binds them, though: Lean certainly hasn’t softened Forster’s condemnation of the British officials’ poisonous thick-skinned detachment. Like the book, the movie is a lament for British sins; the big difference is in tone. The movie is informed by a spirit of magisterial self-hatred. That’s it oddity: Lean’s grand "objective" manner–he never touches anything without defining it and putting it in its place–seems to have developed out of the values he attacks. It’s an imperial bookkeeper’s style–no loose ends. It’s also the style that impressed the Indians, and shamed them because they couldn’t live up to it. It’s the style of the conqueror–who is here the guilt-ridden conqueror but the conqueror nevertheless. Lean has an appetite for grandeur. That may explain why, at the start, he puts the Viceroy on the ship with the two women (and why, the caves in India not being imposing enough, he dynamited and made his own.). But his appetite for grandeur also accounts for such memorable images as the red uniforms and headgear on the Indian band mangling Western music in the brilliant sunshine at the whites-only club, and the ancient painted elephant that lurches along from the train to the caves with Dr. Aziz, Mrs. Moore, and Miss Quested on its back.

Page 1 | 2