Word: aziz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...understand the dreadful disorienting power made manifest by the echo, and their answer to it is withdrawal from the world. One is a Hindu sage, Professor 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...
...Image reverberates to image endlessly in this film. The early shots of the great arch and the little train lost in the huge landscape propose the film's overarching theme?India as mysterious and maddening cavern?and then Lean starts the echoes rolling through it. When Mrs. Moore meets Aziz for the first time, the moon is reflected cool and tiny in a shimmering pool. It does not appear again until she has heard the fateful voice of the caves. Then, suddenly, it looms large over the shoulder of a forbidding monolith, itself reminiscent of a moonscape...
When Adela begins to awaken to her own sexuality, it is at a temple covered with erotic statuary and guarded by a large troop of anarchically aggressive monkeys. Later, going to testify at Aziz's trial, she must drive through a crowd raging at her, and a man in a monkey costume leaps on her car, pressing his face menacingly against the window. Is it this echo that impels her to testify that she was the victim of a hallucination and thus free Aziz from his anguish? The movie is silent on the point, allowing us to make what...