This is a film that I truly wanted to love because as a fan of the Merchant Ivory films, it seemed to have a lot of potential. Also, being interested in Indian culture, I wanted to see it for that aspect, and there I was not disappointed. You get a lot of that but you do not get much story. It is an examination of a woman's life through letters left behind that are in the hands of her great-niece Julie Christie. Greta Scacchi, in her film debut, gets better material than Christie, and her performance and character reminds me of an underrated drama she did a few years later, "White Mischief".
When Christie arrives in India, she goes to the exact locations where her aunt went 60 years before, and in comparing that gap, it appears that not much has changed. In a sense, she is nearly possessed by her aunt Spirit as she finds herself drawn into this strange culture, finding solace there and making friends with the locals, eventually having an affair with a married Indian man.
As I said above, the better sequences are the earlier ones, dealing with newlyweds Scacchi and Christopher Cazenove, and it's obvious that she finds little passion in that marriage. She's very similar in that area to Miss Quested in "A Passage to India" and Karin Blixen in "Out of Africa", but those are better films that flow with better pacing and more interesting stories. You don't even get the vistas of the beautiful Indian countryside, just glimpses into some of the traditions and a bit of historical relevance. It's nearly humorless and at times that makes it tedious to get through.
When Christie arrives in India, she goes to the exact locations where her aunt went 60 years before, and in comparing that gap, it appears that not much has changed. In a sense, she is nearly possessed by her aunt Spirit as she finds herself drawn into this strange culture, finding solace there and making friends with the locals, eventually having an affair with a married Indian man.
As I said above, the better sequences are the earlier ones, dealing with newlyweds Scacchi and Christopher Cazenove, and it's obvious that she finds little passion in that marriage. She's very similar in that area to Miss Quested in "A Passage to India" and Karin Blixen in "Out of Africa", but those are better films that flow with better pacing and more interesting stories. You don't even get the vistas of the beautiful Indian countryside, just glimpses into some of the traditions and a bit of historical relevance. It's nearly humorless and at times that makes it tedious to get through.