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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 we will of the image.
Then there is the matter of the bouquet. Very early in the film Adela is given one by her fiancé as he welcomes her to Chandrapore. Very late in the film, the throbbing engines of a ship bearing Mrs. Moore homeward take on the tone and pitch of the cave's echo, and she dies. When she is buried at sea, an anonymous passenger throws a bouquet like Adela's into the water as the body slides under the waves. Echoes, echoes.
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 require radical revision.
This, finally, is what the echoes in A Passage to India are whispering and thundering. In his 82nd year, Forster was still insisting on that point. No, he said, responding testily to reviews of a theatrical adaptation of his book, it was not merely about the incompatibility of East and West. It was about "the difficulty of living in the universe." In other words, it was, among other things, a David Lean movie waiting to be made. And now we have it, sober and witty, subtle yet eminently approachable. It is a movie both true to its source and true to the highest imperatives of its own medium. Above all, it is true to our sense of the world as it echoes in the common consciousness of our times.
—By Richard Schickel