Reeling Backward: A Passage to India (1984)
David Lean's last film -- after a 14-year break -- was seen as a return to form. But it's an odd, sprawling work with an epic backdrop but a pinched sense of storytelling.
“I feel perfectly ordinary.”
“That's much the best feeling to have.”
Say what you will about the filmography of David Lean, but he made big pictures — epic in scale and scope, usually long in running time and stuffed with momentous events and indelible characters.
“Lawrence of Arabia.” “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” “Doctor Zhivago.” These movies had outsized, important stories to tell, not just about the particular people in them but the human condition writ large. Especially, our foibles and grand delusions.
Lean was so hurt by the critical and commercial flop of “Ryan’s Daughter” that he would not make another film for 14 years, despite a few fits and starts on other projects. “A Passage to India” was seen as a return to form, garnering solid reviews and box office, plus another huge pile of Oscar nominations (10), including nods for Best Picture and Lean’s direction. At age 76, riding a high note, he wisely hung it up for good.
I have to confess, having experienced the film for the first time, I came away disappointed.
It’s an odd, sprawling work that boasts Lean’s usual epic backdrop, with a romantic view of the Indian landscape and culture. But it has a pinched, crabbed sense of storytelling: a big movie about very small things.
Based on the novel by E.M. Forster, and to a lesser extent the stage adaptation by Santha Rama Rau, the film commits the cardinal sin of not knowing who its main character is. Instead its theme, about the irretrievably broken relationship between the British and their then-subject Indians, becomes its lackluster centerpiece.
Watching the first half of the movie, you’d come away with the unswaying impression that it’s the story of Adela Quested, a smart but unmoored young woman who travels to Chandrapore, India, in the company of an elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, with the vague intention of marrying her son, Ronny Heaslop, who has become the city magistrate. The setting is the 1920s, a time of dizzying transition from a world of horse and rickshaw to one of telegrams and motorcars.
Miss Quested (as she is invariably referred to) and Mrs. Moore are passionate about getting to know the real India, and not just the cloistered ersatz England the Brits have built for themselves in their walled villas and exclusive clubs. They trundle about the dusty common streets in their fancy cars, the overlords-in-residence.
Two young Indian lawyers, run off the road while riding bicycles, observe that while it takes new male British arrivals two years to acquire a smug sense of racial superiority, for the ladies only six months is required.
Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore soon meet and befriend Dr. Aziz Ahmed, a humble widower who serves a mostly British clientele. He is eager to please and subservient, and sees their kindness to him as a great honor.
They also take a shine to Richard Fielding, the president of the English-run Government College, who has lived in India many years and feels more affection for the people than his own fellow Brits. His colleague/friend is Professor Godbole, a somewhat dingy academic with a tendency to speak in harmonious platitudes.
These six people more or less make up the major characters, along with a handful of others who float in and out of the story at various points.
However, Miss Quested (played by Judy Davis) recedes greatly in the second half of the movie, while Fielding and Dr. Aziz come to the fore. Indeed, the film concludes with the pair, played by Edward Fox and Victor Banerjee, having reconciled their friendship but parting with a sense of finality — an allegory for their respective countries.
Mrs. Moore and her son (Peggy Ashcroft and Nigel Havers) have disappeared completely by the end — in her case, necessitated by her death, and Ronny by having been very publicly dumped by Miss Quested.
As for poor Godbole, most of his screen time ended up on the cutting room floor, and he winds up almost as the film’s mascot rather than a main character. This greatly irked Alec Guinness, who played Godbole as something of a make-up for a biopic of Gandhi he and Lean were to have made in the 1960s, and the two reportedly did not speak again until shortly before Lean’s death in 1991… perhaps unconsciously mimicking Aziz and Fielding.
(We’ll pause here to note that yes, children, once upon a time in Hollywood it was not unusual for an actor of one race to play a character of another. Nowadays they call it “brownface” when a fair-skinned performer plays a duskier person, a reference to the makeup used. Eventually a biopic of Gandhi did get made and released a couple of years before this movie starring Ben Kingsley, of both British and Indian heritage, who nevertheless wore a tincture to darken his skin for the role — and no one complained then or now. It’s a spiteful game that, as the sentient computer learns in another contemporaneous film, “WarGames,” the only way to win is not to play.)
The film’s fulcrum point is an expedition organized by Dr. Aziz for Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested to visit the (fictional) Marabar Hills, known for its mysterious echoing caves. There a supposed attempted rape takes place, with Miss Quested fleeing down the mountain in a state of high hysteria, her skin shredded by cacti spines.
Dr. Aziz is arrested and his trial takes up the entire third act, with Fielding taking his side while all of the proper British sect view Aziz’ conviction as a foregone conclusion. The Indian populace, which had been predisposed to view Dr. Aziz as a toadying sellout, embraces him as their maligned hero and threaten to riot if he is found guilty.
Having not read Forster’s novel, my understanding is the veracity of the assault is left ambiguous. However, from the film it’s hard to conclude anything other than it is purely the figment of Miss Quested’s fevered imagination. She is highly ambivalent about marrying Ronny, and quizzes the good doctor about his relationship with his late wife during their climb to the caves.
She essentially goes into a swoon or stupor, brought on by her repressed sexuality, and her brain fills in the gaps.
This line of demarcation in the story is important, not just because it determines all the events that transpire after but whose eyes the audience sees them through. Up until this time Miss Quested has been our cinematic avatar. But after her fit she is kept abed until the trial, during which time Aziz and Fielding share center stage.
Tensions soon run high, and the trial becomes a stand-in for referendum on Indian emancipation from Great Britain. A rabble-rousing attorney is brought in to defend the doctor, Amrit Rao, played by Roshan Seth, who portrayed Nehru in “Gandhi” and also the prime minister in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” released a few months earlier.
By the time Miss Quested finally reappears at the trial, she has no standing with the audience or in the story. Our protagonist has morphed into the villainess, and for no good justification that we can see. Davis does what she can with the role, giving Miss Quested a sort of willful curiosity, something of a proto-feminism, alluded to by her surname.
She soon breaks down on the witness stand and absolves Dr. Aziz, and all the sturm and drang has been for naught. Having been literally abandoned by Ronny and Major Callendar, the pompous leader of local Brit society, Miss Quested seeks refuge with Fielding, who shows empathy despite her false accusation against his friend. He demands to know why she brought the charges, and she has no answer to give.
The only allusion to her inner turmoil comes in an earlier, rather ridiculous sequence in which Miss Quested bicycles into the countryside and comes across an abandoned temple of sorts. She is ensorcelled by the erotic statues showing men and women twisted into an almost violent embrace, and then she is attacked by the horde of monkeys that have taken up residence there.
Later, during the mass protests that accompany the trial, she is accosted several times by men wearing monkey costumes, who screech at her with bestial aggression.
So I guess the takeaway is supposed to be that the virginal Miss Quested, despite her outward air of confidence and intelligence, is scared of dicks? Especially darker, Indian ones?
These seems rather thin gruel upon which to base a character’s motivations, let alone the plot of a 163-minute movie. Even in 1984, it’s hopelessly archaic stuff — fainting couches and racial terror.
“India forces one to come face to face with oneself. It can be disturbing,” intones Mrs. Moore to Miss Quested, and in the younger woman’s case the revelation is murky and icky.
Peggy Ashcroft won the Oscar for her supporting role as Mrs. Moore, and indeed she gets many of the best lines of dialogue. Her character resides somewhere between the strict hegemony mindset of the British and the pure open-mindedness of Fielding. When she is banished from India by her son — to avoid testifying on Dr. Aziz’ behalf — the film instantly loses energy.
Frequent Lean collaborator Maurice Jarre won his third Oscar for his musical score, having also won for “Lawrence” an “Zhivago.” I have to say the music did not leave an impression on me, barely event registering as present.
It’s a shame. Having adored David Lean’s films — “The Bridge on the River Kwai” is my all-time favorite — I feel let down by his last go, and a sense of loneliness in it being given plaudits I deem undeserved. The grandiosity of his oeuvre finished on a shriveled note.