A PASSAGE TO INDIA
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
E.M.Forster's A PASAGE TO INDIA attempts to deal with the ignominious behavior of the English towards their Indian captives by using a relationship between a sexually repressed Englishwoman -- the spoiled, unattractive Adela Quested -- and an exceedingly felicitous Indian doctor named Aziz. On her first trip to India, Quested is eager to "know" the Indians, whom the English have notoriously, cruelly snubbed, and quickly befriends Aziz who, in return, extends manners and amicability by offering to take her sight-seeing, particularly to the cryptic Marabar Caves. Aziz, however, is not at all aware of Quested's festering and fateful obsession with sex -- he's oblivious to her attraction to his tanned, rich-looking skin, his glistening eyes, teeth and hair (attractions Forster himself had to Indians) -- so when Quested, alone in the caves, loses control of her heated flashes, precipitated by the thrusting echoes of his voice, he has no idea of her fit of hysteria and is rightly perplexed when he's arrested for rape. The immoral pointer is that the smug English immediately become satisfied with Aziz's guilt and expected conviction during the trial. The presumption of transgression -- out of historical prejudice, superiority and unflagging insensitivity -- is so die-hardly cast that the uncertainty of the alleged crime is not thought to matter. To make more contrived what is essentially a simple story, Forster, a highly regarded travel writer (his THE HILL OF DEVI is considered by some the basis for INDIA), lays on some touristy Indian mysticism and attempts to link it to what he regards is a possibly better morality, a fairer jurisprudence. While it's a subjective read, and told in a genteel reproving manner (Forster was once a don) to shame the Rajperialists, it also fails to make connections, not unlike the way the more elevated D.H. Lawrence novel THE PLUMED SERPENT, which starts out as an indictment of a Celtic woman's initial prejudicial views of Mexican culture, gets bogged down and is unable to bond themes.
D.H. Lawrence once wrote, "A man of strong soul has too much honour for the other body -- man or woman -- to use it as a means of masturbation. So he remains neutral, inactive. That is Forster." Because we now know more about Forster than Lawrence might have, this description is not altogether true, but it's an apt one for Forster the writer -- and David Lean as director. On hearing that the rights to A PASSAGE TO INDIA were finally being offer by holder King's College (in Cambridge), Lean reported that the first thing he said to the purchaser, producer John Brabourne (of MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS) was, "What did happen in the caves?" Lean is suggesting that the incident in the caves is unsolved mystery, and it is if you're willing to believe that Forster was a mannered, prim asexualist who wouldn't consider self-manipulation. The key to the sequence is Quested's measured contriteness afterwards, and since we know Aziz didn't physically violate her, she either got spooked by something in the caves or masturbated. She may even have had a spontaneous orgasm -- but would Forster have known about such things? (And had he, wouldn't that have made him and not Lawrence the first priest of sex?) If Quested had been terrified by anything other than her own wet panties, would she have acquiesced to the imperialism? A viewer might ask: Didn't she really want Aziz? A closet homosexual (who once had W.H. Auden as a lover) Forster couldn't overtly tackle the agony of hiding the rush and liberation of sex -- which is why he waited until after his death to allow publication of MAURICE, about his own first gay loves. He binds Quested in much the same way: she doesn't know how to respond to what her own society has told her is forbidden -- her own sexual feelings, especially any with racial overtones; instead, she allows society to reflexively respond for her. (This may be the unheralded moral of the novel -- that silence is as much of a breaker of the 9th Commandment as overt false trespass.) In Lean's wringy hands, though, the guessing game continues. He's handled the murkiness in the caves with such god damn good taste that we don't have any idea what happened; even when Quested is on the stand testifying, the flashbacks are all repeats -- of insignificance.
We can not be surprised: Lean de-sexes sexual moments. The bits of fiery hunger between Rod Steiger and Julie Christie in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO were not guided by Lean but by Steiger, who, somewhat in the Stanislavsky mode, instigated real friction between himself and Christie in order to put an animalism into their scenes. Are we to believe Peter O'Toole's T.E. in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA went ravenously blood hungry after sadist Jose Ferrer violated his privates? (The incident, written as almost exquisite homoeroticism in SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM, may not have happened; and if it did, the hunger might indeed have been for what he was supposedly repelled by.) While there's no lack of comprehension in Sarah Miles' disappointment in Robert Mitchum's stamina in RYAN'S DAUGHTER, her lust for limping Christopher Jones got clammy and, finally, preposterous. Our suspicions of the director's fear of sex have been confirmed on a recent A & E Biography about Robert Mitchum, in which Miles did a funny capsulation on Lean's cigarette-puffing discomfort. Sometimes Lean's sexual intent can get unintentionally funny: When Rossano Brazzi and Katharine Hepburn smooch in SUMMERTIME and we get the climaxy fireworks, did anybody in the audience believe for a minute he could really get it up for that bag of bones? In A PASSAGE TO INDIA, Lean had his best shot at being less than his usual tastefully panicked self because he didn't have to worry about censors as he did with LAWRENCE and RYAN'S DAUGHTER. He must have been thinking quite seriously about the incident in the caves because he was displeased with those nature provided and required that some be dynamited. The way the movie is constructed, it appears that what happened in the caves would become The Rape of the Seven Veils, with Quested's eventual testimony as flashbacks unveiling each layer until, if only for the audience, the revelation of no rape at all. But that doesn't happen; in fact, literally, figuratively, filmicly, absolutely nothing happens. (Had James Ivory directed, we might have gotten the autoerotic alternative.) On second thought, Lean isn't so much a "strong soul" but a weak one afraid of offending those who are still afraid of masturbation. Admirers of the novel will say that Lean shows fidelity -- because Quested in the book reveals nothing. But one of Forster's intrigues, one of his plants, is that he allows a wife and son to have unexpressed suspicions -- probably the same ones we have.
It's no accident that Paul Scott's four novels, together known as "The Raj Quartet," and made into a multi-part TV series under the title of his first, THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, are reasonably similar in general plot structure to A PASSAGE TO INDIA: Scott found Forster's novel to be a truncated reading experience -- the cruel panoply of India under British rule downplayed -- and he was determined to write about India as it really was; therefore, he used his rape much more decisively, in a more Britishly sadistic way. Scott's right because Forster got so wrapped up in manners and his travel writing that he ends up almost exonerating his true rapists and their indifference: few Englishmen show regret. (In fact, the novelist dares our tolerance by suggesting that the accuser is "brave" and showed "courage" and at one point allows her to declare herself "honest.") And the one character in Forster's novel who could have stopped the farce of Aziz's trial -- the noble Mrs. Moore -- unaccountably dies without so much as one quiet showdown with Quested, whom Mrs. Moore suspects is being pressured into false testimony. Scott refuses to be kind: he blisters the agonistic British mindset, its stiff self-righteousness and superciliousness. (Having died of cancer in 1978, Scott never got the chance to see his quadrilogy turned into one of the tube's more enthralling miniseries. Boozy maverick Christopher Hitchens, in his PREPARED FOR THE WORST, does him justice too.)
As Quested, the Australian Judy Davis is almost a ringer for a puffy Lee Grant, and she gives her lines a hardened edge that recalls Glenda Jackson. Unlike Jackson's let-it-bleed toughness, which is often convincing in a sexual, masochist context, Davis looks consciously held back: we must take for granted that she's been fearsomely hit by a tidal wave of carnality. One of India's major actors, Victor Banerjee as Aziz is just too on the brink of every emotion; he seems to be enjoying it, but do we? His eager-beaver work is meant to be as crowd-pleasing as John Mills' idiot in RYAN'S DAUGHTER, yet there's an anxiety that goes beyond the character: he appears over-willing to be intimidated. Alec Guinness in bad Indian drag is Lean's idea of comic relief, though am I the only one to detect Donald Pleasence's villainy in the voice? As the novel's beloved Mrs. Moore, Dame Peggy Ashcroft's seasoned grace and amenity are the movie's only warm spots, but frankly, I think our interest in her -- at the time the movie was released -- had much more to do with her real acting in THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, in which she put on quite a show as Barbie Batchelor. As Lean directs her, she's not much more than a flighty English version of our dearly American Martha Scott. (Ashcroft won the Oscar for INDIA, but it's very likely the Academy members were glued to their TVs during voting time, when JEWEL was first shown in this country. And for those who have seen the series, perhaps they'd agree that of all of Scott's character summations, the most dissatisfying lack of comeuppance was regarding Barbie's nemesis, the drunk-bitch Mildred Layton, played to the imperious hilt by Judy Parfitt, who's a dead-ringer for Bea Lillie.) It's James Fox as the conscience-of-England Fielding who manages to make the most of his role. His hair bleached, arms swaying without affectation, manner imperturbable, this Fielding grows ever more likable and not only is he the only Englishman to do right by the Indians, he also does right by Mrs. Moore. It is the film's only moving, spiritual moment when Aziz, who saw in Mrs. Moore the kindest of faces, realizes that through Fielding "she lives."
You can make a successful epic out of mediocre material, but, as Lean proved with RYAN'S DAUGHTER, you can't if the material is minimal. As Scott knew, and as most readers acknowledge, Forster's A PASSAGE TO INDIA is pretty thin stuff. He wanted it to be a seriocomic read, and he even provided a silly finale to secure his aim. This is the kind of novel that has boulders talking to one another, and horses, the earth, temples, birds and the sky resisting reconciliation. Of course Forster saw India, its space, mysticism and people as spectacular. But within the environs and attributes -- one of which was his prophecy about India's eventual sovereignty -- his is still a very small story full of "pathos-is-the-highest-quality-in-art" traps, guesses and empty pauses. And that's what's clearly wrong with the movie: Lean is a director who "sees" big, and that's not the same as thinking in a big, meaningful way. Small stories, however big the metaphors in them, get in the way of his visions; there's simply not enough scale to impersonalize, which has become his real specialty, his refuge. Forster once said, "Gauguin and Van Gogh were too much for me." It's likely that he'd say of Lean's inflated nothingness, which exposes the thinness of INDIA as novel, "There's not enough for me."
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