Word: leans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...surfaces, has been a conundrum for readers ever since its publication 60 years ago, was flirting dangerously with calamity. After all, a novel that speaks in a quiet adult voice, and that proceeds from delicate ironies to the contemplation of metaphysical mysteries, is not your customary movie property. That Lean has brought this essentially schizoid work to the screen with such sureness, elegance and hypnotic force is akin to a miracle...
...Moore and Godbole are the last of the film's matched pairs, and narratively the least important of them. But it is in their almost haughty indifference to the mundane and reasonable that the story's meaning is vested. And it is in them that Lean's art reaches its subtlest heights. They scarcely exchange a word, but they silently signal to each other from cut to cut, across vales of karma, achieving a communion that none of the other characters, for all their talk, ever do. In a way, they could be said to resonate to each other, echo...
Echoes, echoes. The critic Lionel Trilling described the novel as "a book which is contrived of echoes." The movie, if it were to achieve the kind of spiritual, as opposed to literal, faithfulness to its source that Lean aspired to, had to be a thing of echoes too?but visual, not auditory, echoes. 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...
Paradoxically, the care with which Lean lets such intricately wrought correspondences speak for themselves creates a danger that the partially attentive may again mistake him for what he is not: an empty pictorialist. Or, because his characters wear costumes and move against an authentic historical background, in classically composed scenes that do not obviously assert his personality or linger over his cleverness, some people may persist in seeing him as an old-fashioned moviemaker...
Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of his films, intimate or expansive in scale, return obsessively to the same theme: a lone individual voyages out from familiar surroundings into exotic ones. These characters are tested (as Lean has liked to test himself on the far-flung locations of his wandering life), forced to examine their assumptions about themselves, the world, their places in it. All of them must affirm their humanity against the indifference?the muddle?of whatever corner of the unhelpful universe they find themselves. All discover, sooner or later, happily or unhappily, that their original certainties...