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I'm at a loss, frankly, to understand why people rave about this film. I saw it this evening and was aching for it to end.
The picture seems to alternate between being a Cooks Tour Indian travelogue and a tedious domestic drama in the worst of the British Raj tradition. The white people are all very serious and say things that I think are supposed to be profound but, for the most part, simply sound ludicrous. (There's actually one mother-daughter scene where daughter is told that the pain of childbirth is nothing compared to the joy of making a child for the husband you love. I expect that the "close your eyes and think of England" line ended up on the cutting room floor.) The tedious story is aggravated by some of the worst acting you're likely to have the chance to see in a single two hour sitting and an endless voice-over narration that seems to substitute for actual filmic storytelling. (Plus there are a couple of unbelievable moments -- like when the 13/14? year old English girl is apparently free to wander about the town by herself. I'm not saying she wouldn't have been safe, but I find it hard to believe she would be allowed to do that.)
But rest assured that all the Indians we see are seen only through the lens of how picturesque their impoverished lives are --- especially when you're watching from the veranda of your big English house. Everyone seems to spend the day playing music or bathing in the river or preparing for a festival. How fun!!!
I can only think that the supersaturated Technicolor was overwhelming to audiences in the 1950's and that people hadn't really seen anything about India before. To me today, it comes across as a garbled mess -- like a Powell/Pressburger film made on a $2.95 budget. Ugg.
If you want to see some wonderful film-making about the real India of roughly the same period watch any (or all) of Satyajit Rey's amazing "Apu" trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Apur Sansar) instead.
score 4/10
TooShortforThatGesture 27 February 2006
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1302426/ |
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19-2-2021 04:58:09