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'Passage to India' a masterpieceBy MARY DEHNER David Lean, whose 46-year career as a filmmaker has included such film classics as “Doctor Zhivago,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” and “Brief Encounter,” has crowned his film career with a masterpiece: “A Passage to India.”The film, based on the 1924 book by E. M. Forster, tracks a young English woman’s quest for adventure and ultimately her own identity in colonial India of the 1920s.The making of this film is a tour de force for writer, director and editor David Lean who combines a strong story with fully-developed characters and terrific images. There are moments when more judicious editing would have prevented seat squirming, but overall the film is excellentJUDY DAVIS plays Adela Quested, the plain English woman who travels with her future mother-in-law, Mrs. Moore, to see ha* fiance in India. Dame Peggy Ashcroft, who plays Mrs. Moore, may win an Academy award Domination for her warm and wise portrayal of a woman who cansee beyond the boundaries of one lifetime.The two women get their first taste of Colonial mores en route to India over a shipboard dinner with a pompous viceroy and his wife who tell the women they don’t associate with Indians socially.“East is East, Mrs. Moore. It’s a question of culture,” the viceroy's haughty wife tells the women.“A Passage to India,” storing Jndy Davis, Dune Peggy Ashcroft and Alec Guinness, ++++.Lean contrasts the two cultures as soon as the boat lands. The women are hustled past the crowds of tur-baned beads and tanned bodies pressing against their carriage to the sanitised British sector with its clipped English lawns and empty streets.A CLUB mentality permeates this “Little London” enclave carved out of the swarming Indian countryside.Wanting to break out of the tight-knit British community, Mrs. Moore and Adela ask their hosts to introduce them to some real Indians. What ensues is a “bridge party” intended to bridge the gap between East and West in which hundreds of upper-class Indians are snubbed by their hosts.But this is a story of much more than colonial snobbery and class conflict Lean subtley combines philosophy and mysticism in a visually rich and entertaining story of Adela’s quest for adventure and Mrs. Moore’s fear of her own mortality.In one memorable scene the elderly Mrs. Moore meets Dr. Aziz in a moonlit mosque on the Ganges. They become friends and form the first real bridge between East and West. ■ONE OF THE beauties of Lean’s work is his masterly use of symbolic imagery. It resonates through the film, shot in the lush Indian countryside.In one scene Adela takes a bike ride through a field of tall grass and stumbles on a temple of love. The temple’s erotic stooe figures foreshadow the film’s mysterious events(Continued on Page 15)
Newspaper Details
Oak Forest Star
Oak Forest, Illinois, US
Sun, Jan 27, 1985
Page 82
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 15 Jan 2020
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