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Dir. David Lean
Rating: 6.5 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
David Lean, one of the old guard of British epic auteurs, is a full service film artist. In addition to directing this sweeping E.M. Forster 1984 adaptation, he also wrote the screenplay and edited the final film -- though one may wish in that latter role he had managed to chop a bit more off its hefty 164-minute running time. The story concerns Adela Quested (Judy Davis), a young British woman off to visit her unofficial fiancé, Ronny Heaslop (Nigel Havers) a magistrate in India, along with his mother, Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) in tow. The two women, in their disregard for British colonial arrogance, seem far better suited to one another than to the unfortunate Heaslop, who more or less plays the regrettable party line. When Mrs. Moore makes the acquaintance of a charming, young Indian doctor, Aziz Ahmed (Victor Banerjee), and he offers to take the pair up to a set of caves in the mountains, they are thrilled at the opportunity to see the real countryside. What happens on that journey remains in doubt, even at the end the of the film, but somehow or other, Adela comes tearing down the mountain, claiming to have been attacked by Aziz. Despite the set-up, the film hardly plays as a dramatic legal procedural -- there are no sneak attacks and faulty witnesses nor cornpone summations by melodramatic defense attorneys. Rather, Lean is more interested in the kind of British provincial superiority that enabled the country to continue to try to bend other cultures to their will in the face of the near-total hatred of those occupied countries. What is indeed damn peculiar is the ambiguous nature of the end result: Seemingly, everyone gets more or less what they want by the end of the film, but you are still filled with a strange sense of regret for all involved. God save the Queen.
This special two-disc edition is chock-filled with extras, including a profile of E.M. Forster, a documentary on the casting of the film, and another doc about the methods and preparation David Lean put into his productions.
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