“You shouldn’t walk alone, Mrs. Moore. There are bad characters about, and leopards may come down from the Marabar Hills – snakes also!”

‘A Passage to India’, directed by David Lean in 1984, is a British period drama set during the 1920s in colonial India. Victor Banerjee plays Aziz Ahmed, a doctor who is keen to impress the English. He encounters a kind, elderly women called Mrs Moore, played by Peggy Ashcroft, whose son Ronny is engaged to marry a young woman called Adela, played by Judy Davis. Dr Aziz takes Mrs Moore and Adela on an outing to some caves, but whilst there Adela suffers from a breakdown and believes that she has been attacked. Aziz is arrested and charged with assault, and seemingly his only British defenders are the local teacher Richard Fielding, played by James Fox, and Mrs Moore. It’s a rich and visually stunning film, as would be expected from Lean. Like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Lean squeezes the most out of a foreign landscape, but in this film it is the collision between the English and India that forms the texture of the film, so scenes showing afternoon tea and a game of Polo are uneasily juxtaposed with scenes of Adela getting lost in an abandoned temple with erotic carving and feral monkeys. There is a strange, almost mythological background to the film, as if Lean was taking inspiration from the more avant-guard Nic Roeg. The sweep of the landscape is still prevalent, but Lean also manages to play with the alien-ness of the location and culture to create a film in which it’s never clear which group of characters is really out of place.

Would I recommend it? It’s a good and accessible example of Lean’s work. Short than his other historical epics and with a more intimate touch.