Judy Davis is phenomenal...

I'm getting in on this years late, but hopefully you're still getting notices...

You're absolutely right. One of the great performances in film history, as far as I'm concerned, and by "great" I mean in the all-time top 10. At least. Same for the film, which is horribly underrated on IMDB. Both the film and her performance require a seriously adult attention span and an interest in the philosophical, political, and cultural undercurrents of the story, which of course hurts the wideness of its appeal. (I loved Amadeus too, and have seen it probably 10 times, but PTI beats it because of what it's attempting to do, even though Amadeus isn't a "little" movie--it's about big important things as well.)

Really, in the theater, this was one of the three greatest film experiences of my life. I don't know if you saw it on the big screen, but it was just incomparable.

By the way, OP, "sensual" is exactly the word that comes to mind for me, too, in a somewhat dignified and subtle way, but unmistakable nonetheless. Davis was able to make this character like an irrepressible walking mass of curiosity--not merely carnal curiosity, of course, but that too--which (if memory serves) was not precisely the way the character was written by Forster in the novel. In the film, this looks like a girl who can't _wait_ to get outside the lines of English propriety and see the world, but then has something happen in her subconscious that draws her back from the brink when she senses internally that she's bitten off too much, that all this self-honesty into which India forces you (remember Mrs. Moore's line about how something about India makes you confront yourself) went too far, too fast for her. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that instead of India as an object she looks at with geniune and positive curiosity, she moves to a state of personal entwinement in a way that is unexpected and shocking to her; India is no longer a far-off idea or something a young Englishwoman turns over in her hands like a photo; it's no longer completely separate from her, but trying to enfold her or become a part of her, with her surprising desire for Aziz (of which Lean spoke in an interview) as either an expression of the momentum toward that state of "joining" or a metaphor of it.

This is all very much in line with the literary idea of the "sublime," not a synonym for "wonderful," but rather a state of being beside one's normal consciousness, transformed in the face of contemplating the vastness or strangeness of what is actually real beyond one's categorical thinking or mental constructs. Burke described it as "delightful horror," a transformative state in which the ego tended to be lost to an indescribable feeling of pleasure and yet terror at the disintegration of identity. What better way to describe Adela's state of mind, and how she teetered too far toward the "terror" end, like a bad LSD trip that started out good? (I'm using the analogy on purpose; heavy drugs are said to induce the same kind of state at times, and of course Coleridge, for one, was way into that, not coincidentally at a time when the idea of the "sublime" was really taking off with the Romantics. I'm also not advocating or equating the "sublime" experience with "truth." It may not be. It may be mere biochemistry and a feeling induced by altered consciousness, and religious or philosophical truth may be elsewhere [I think it is, actually]. But the point is, Forster certainly would've known of the tradition, and it really fits Adela's character.)


Anyway, IMHO, the way Davis played the character--as less a "prig" than Forster had her--was exactly right for the screen and for the time. And some of the scenes with Davis would have "sensual" as only an introductory word for what you see in her face.

Judy Davis is phenomenal...

Me too. When I saw the lineup and that the Oscar was given to Field I was very disappointed. This performance is subtle and elegant. That year she was the winner.