Bombay, some time in the 1920s. Military band music. Massed cavalry. Mobs of the curious, somehow menacing in their vastness. The Viceroy and his lady are returning from England to India. As they pass through a great ceremonial arch, it fills the screen, dwarfing them and casting them, as symbols of an empire's transitory pomp, into the subcontinent's tuneless perspective.
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. In the shadowy foreground of these shots loom India's temples and palaces, symbols of its several cultures and religions, of a history—a maddeningly complex reality—impenetrable to the passing stranger.
Morning, some weeks later. Miss Quested has found her adventure, her brief and, as it will happen, terrifying glimpse of Indian reality. A young Muslim physician, Dr. Aziz, has mounted an excursion to the Marabar Caves, in the hills beyond Chandrapore, for the two English ladies. To transport them in style he has laid on a huge retinue of servants and an elephant. "An old, old animal, an ancient, ancient animal, plodding on almost back into the past," is how the man who made the film describes the creature. But even this great beast and the train of servants stretching out behind it are reduced to insignificance by the featureless rocks that tower above them along the way.
These are awesome images, astonishing images. But in the superb film that David Lean has made from E.M. Forster's sublime novel A Passage to India, their function far transcends the purely pictorial. In Lean's cinema there is no such thing as an idle shot, something that survives to the final cut merely because it is striking in its beauty or novel in its impact. Particularly in the Lean films that people conveniently but mistakenly identify as "epics" or "spectacles"—movies like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago—the largest weight of his meaning is carried not by dialogue but by images, and by his manner of juxtaposing them in the editing.
This is perhaps truer than ever in Passage. Like Forster, Lean uses India not just as a colorful and exotic setting but as a decisive force in shaping the story he is telling, almost as a character. And as a resonant symbol: of the unknowable and chaotic universe everyone inhabits; of the unknowable and chaotic inner life that inhabits everyone. Those images in which man's pretensions to power, to mastery over self and fate, are trivialized, swallowed up in the vastness of the Indian earth and sky, are careful, conscious efforts to express the film's theme visually without stating it flatly, in words.