The Assam Garden (1985)

Undescribable Perfection

That was an excellent one.

Best movie of this year hands down!

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Having read about Henry Cook and his "subtropical garden," the setting for "The Assam Garden," I was really eager to locate a copy of this movie. However once viewed I was sadly disappointed. Deborah Kerr does a good job of representing an English woman who was a 'somebody' in India, the wife of a tea plantation manager, but in England is, essentially, a 'nobody' -- a relic of a forgotten time, and not a particularly sympathetic one at that. Her reluctance to adjust to the changing times reminds me of many of the older people I knew growing up. Madhur Jaffrey, on the other hand, turns in a rather wooden performance. I have seen her work in other films and so I can only assume that either the script or the directing, or perhaps both, are to blame here. To make my point, I would refer to the scene where Helen has fallen off the ladder and is lying unconscious on the ground. Ruxmani approaches as if nothing in particular had happened, which made the entire scene rather irrelevant.The last scene of the movie was totally out of character, and seemed like something thrown together after the end of a long day when everyone's creativity was exhausted.Apparently this was a made-for-TV movie, which explains the production values -- or lack thereof. The movie is not entirely awful, and overall the tale of what happened to people after the Raj makes for an interesting story. Perhaps it's a matter of point of view, but I would not compare "The Assam Garden" to "A Passage to India." Instead it reminded me more of "Staying On," the follow-up to "The Jewel In The Crown." I can easily imagine Helen having tea on the porch with Lucy Smalley, reminiscing on 'the good old days' which were probably not as good as either of them remember.Oh, one last nit-picky note: despite what Helen tells Mr. Philpot from the garden society, the banana plants shown in the movie were NOT Musa ensete (now more correctly called Ensete ventricosum), which is a quite distinctive plant, but more likely Musa basjoo or some other more commonly found nursery banana.

This unpretentious little gem came out around the same time as David Lean's PASSAGE TO India, and has been unfairly overshadowed by the blockbuster. I was charmed by the quiet, sensitive, yet emotionally charged portrayal of how an insecure, aggressive widow of a tea garden manager reluctantly develops an affectionate relationship with an Indian housewife and her family. What I found particularly good was that the Indian housewife, played excellently by Madhur Jaffrey, is no impossible goody-goody, but as much a human being with likes, dislikes and prejudices as the widow played by Deborah Kerr. There is also the sad irony of the grandchildren of the Indian family inevitably leaving their 'Indianness' behind in favour of a British lifestyle. Strongly recommended for those in the mood for subtlety and understatement. And it should be watched with Lean's PASSAGE TO India for fruitful comparisons. To my mind, and I'm probably in a minority of one, THE ASSAM GARDEN is the better of the two films. I once possessed a video recording of it, which is now the property of the Film Studies Department of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.