Word: adela
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Night. A train bearing more modest English visitors, Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore, chuffs and hoots across the plains. They are on their way to visit the latter's son in Chandrapore, where he serves the British raj as city magistrate. Adela, plain but secretly a spirited young woman, contemplates marrying him. But in her berth she dreams vaguely of adventure, of discovering what she likes to call "the real India." Outside, the real India broods enigmatically, and we see the train from another of the subcontinent's perspectives, as a tiny toy almost lost at its feet...
...word) of design, a conscious separation of the meaning of the tale from its main narrative line. That narrative, richly peopled with types Forster encountered on two long trips to India, is quite straightforward. Psychologically, the point on which it is poised is the suppressed emotional tipsiness of Adela Quested. As played in the movie by Australian Actress Judy Davis, Adela is dull at first glance but with a wild surmise glowing in her eyes, her gestures half formed, alternately acknowledging and denying the curious new telegraphy that India is dot-dashing through her ganglia. She will have her adventure...
...Adela gains her opportunity through another Englishman, Mr. Fielding, principal of the local school, who is gracefully played by James Fox to represent the better side of Englishness: liberal and reasonable, humane and humorous. Fielding introduces Adela to her balancing (and ultimately unbalancing) Indian opposite, Dr. Aziz. In Victor Banerjee's electrifying performance, Aziz is eager to please and quick to anger, a bundle of nerves ricocheting wildly through the film. He is just naive and self-absorbed enough not to perceive Adela's vulnerable state. He fails to understand that the Marabar Caves are more than a tourist attraction...
...caves. What actually happens when Aziz and Adela separate from the rest of their party and go off alone to explore the remotest of them? This is the question that everyone, from humble English-lit student to magisterial critic, has been pondering since Forster published in 1924. All we know is that on the trek to them the conversation between man and woman drifts uncomfortably toward matters of the heart, that they enter different caves, that Adela becomes frightened and disoriented as the result of an echo she hears, and that suddenly she is stumbling hysterically back down the hill...
...Godbole, a lively cricket of a man, hopping to some music only the brilliant Alec Guinness can hear. As Fielding busies himself with Aziz's defense, Godbole's comment is merely "You can do what you like, but the outcome will be the same." The other is Mrs. Moore, Adela's traveling companion, almost comically regal at some moments, uncannily vulnerable in others, but always touched by mystery as Peggy Ashcroft delicately plays her. Mrs. Moore enters only one cave, then reels out of it, having confronted her own mortality. Later, when people try to draw her back into...