It’s intriguing to see India through the lens of a foreigner, and their experiences in the country. Most of these films have been made by a director of repute, such as Roland Joffe(City of Joy), David Lean(A Passage to India), Richard Attenborough (Gandhi), and others. The James Bond film OCTOPUSSY had certain portions of it filmed in India in places such as Udaipur and others. But I wonder why there are so few films based on Indian experiences by a foreigner when the country attracts a good number of foreign tourists. Also, I am impressed with the perfection with which an actor from the West has portrayed Indian characters. Think of Ben Kingsley as Gandhi, and Alec Guiness as a philosophy scholar and an orthodox Marathi Brahmin in A PASSAGE TO INDIA and you would agree. Do we have examples of vice-versa viz., an Indian actor playing a Westerner with such aplomb. I am not aware of any…
I recently watched the film adaptation of the E.M.Foster’s novel A PASSAGE TO INDIA made in 1984 by David Lean. The canvas, as in most films by DL, is mesmerizing. The deft touch is seen throughout the film. I cite two examples. In an early sequence filmed on Mrs Moore and Miss Quested, representative of the English cultured gentry, are shown retiring for the night in their royal train compartment upon their arrival in India and the sequence cuts to the impoverished teeming Indians sleeping on pavement. The stark contrast in the conditions of the colonial masters and their subject is established through this singular shot. The second one is the quiet escape Mr Godbole (Alec Guiness playing a Marathi Brahmin) makes from the clutches of Mr. Fielding on their scheduled adventure trip to the Malabar caves because it fell on a Tuesday, considered inauspicious by a Hindu. Mr. Godbole must have envisioned something calamitous befalling on the team during the trip to the caves. Without a word being spoken, the scene brilliantly conveys (one needs to decipher this) that an orthodox Hindu Brahmin wouldn’t act against his beliefs. This is a testament to the brilliance of Lean and the exquisite use of visuals in the narration.
The use of mystery as a cinematic device has progressed along two paths. One has spawned the detective genre (mystery solved towards the end), and the other has seen its use as a ploy to explore societal, feminist and other issues. The genre of the later kind have given us films such as Antonioni’s LA AVVENTURA, Mrinal Sen’s EK DIN PRATIDIN and EK DIN ACHANAK, and Lean’s A PASSAGE TO INDIA.
The actors all act brilliantly, whether it’s Victor Bannerjee in the central character, Judy Davis as the mysterious lady who grew closer to VB and thereafter became his nemesis, Edward Fox (The Day of the Jackal) as a sympathetic English man and a friend of VB, and the cameos by Peggy Ashcroft, Roshan Seth, Alec Guiness, Saeed Jaffrey, Art Malik and others. The film was nominated for eleven Academy awards including Best Picture.
In the final analysis, the novel and the film presents a spectrum of diverse English characters, who comes into contact with natives of a nation over which they ruled, as part of their job, wherein both their innate ugly and humane traits came to the fore, thereby becoming a representative work, however fictionalized, of the times.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Talking about cinema 