Merchant Ivory

Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls, a 30-minute documentary film that looks at an aspect of Indian culture from a rather whimsical angle, has always been a popular Merchant Ivory film. The idea for the documentary came from Anthony Korner, an associate of Merchant Ivory's in the period, and now the publisher of Art Forum. It was directed and narrated by him, but the scenario was devised by Ivory. The subject of the film, which cost a modest $17,000 to make, is the most popular dancer in Bombay musical films -- so much so that since 1957 she had appeared in five hundred of them. In part the movie is a montage of scenes from her pictures and of the opening sequence in Bombay Talkie in which Helen dances with Shashi Kapoor on the keys of a giant red typewriter. Indian musical films that provided the background ofBombay Talkie now come to life before the bemused viewer. Stepping neatly around the puritanic codes governing Indian films that forbid direct sexual contact (even kissing), the musicals project sexuality fervently through innuendo -- in teasing situations and the sensuality of Helen's dancing. Extravagantly romantic fantasies are the stuff of this popular art form, of which Helen is clearly "queen."

Tony Buckingham (Geoffrey Kendal) and his wife Carla (Laura Lidell) are the actor-managers of a troupe of traveling Shakespearean actors in post-colonial India; they must grapple with a diminishing demand for their craft as the English theatre on the subcontinent is supplanted by the emerging genre of Indian film. Lizzie Buckingham (Felicity Kendal), the couple's daughter, falls in love with Sanju (Shashi Kapoor), a wealthy young Indian playboy who is also involved in a romance with the glamorous Bombay film star Manjula (Madhur Jaffrey). The Buckinghams, for whom acting is a profession, a lifestyle, and virtually a religion, must weigh their devotion to their craft against their concern over their daughter's future in a country which, it seems, no longer has a place for her.

Like its title, Shakespeare Wallah is a film of unexpected juxtapositions and cultural conflict; it is a look at changing values in art, and an examination of the question of what it means to be indigenous to a place. The nomadic lifestyle of the poor players -- artfully shown through many scenes of their fretful peregrinations around India -- provides the visual enactment of the problem of the Buckinghams' rootlessness, as here we find the first Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala exploration of that subject, the great dilemma for Merchant Ivory characters from Lizzie Buckingham to Ruth Wilcox inHowards End. "Everything is different when you belong to a place. When it's yours," Carla Buckingham quietly and regretfully tells her daughter, the young Englishwoman who was born in India and has never stepped foot on the soil of her "home" country.

Kendal and Lidell (whose experiences as head of a travelling company of players in India were the inspiration for the screenplay) provide a true and affecting center for the film, both onstage as Malvolio or Gertrude, and offstage as artists who have watched their audiences, their fortunes, and their prestige diminish by degrees. The young Felicity Kendal turns in a performance that would send her to stardom in England, while Shashi Kapoor displays a subtlety that suggests a maturation from his earlier work in The Householder.Madhur Jaffrey's inspired Manjula is to date one of the most memorable women in the Merchant Ivory filmography: her performance earned her the Best Actress prize at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival, where Shakespeare Wallah premiered. The musical score is provided by none less than Satyajit Ray, the Indian master-director and composer.

Ivory and Jhabvala's clever use of the Shakespearean scenes in the Buckingham Players' repertoire consistently illuminate and enrich the procceedings: a Maharaja in his darkened dining hall recites lines from the deposition scene in Richard II. Later on, Manjula condescends to visit the theatre and makes a rude, grand entrance while Tony, as Othello, soliloquizes before his murder of Desdemona. There is a deep irony in the juxtaposition of competing passion plays, on-stage and off (and Manjula's entrance in the middle of the scene is even more outrageous when we recall that Othello does not murder Desdemona until Act V of the play: Manjula has not only interrupted the proceedings. She has shown up only for the last ten minutes).

If the Shaksepearean texts cast light on the film, so the film also casts unexpected light on the Shakespearean texts it includes. Ivory and Merchant have captured on film perhaps the last moments in the last place in the world where itinerant players -- like those tragedians of Hamlet -- might arrive from the open road to play before a royal court. When the rain raineth in Feste's song at the end of Twelfth Night, the words acquire a new elegiac tone: the song becomes a summing up, not only for the play but for its players.

A Room With a View captured the attention of the world upon its release, bringing the novel by E.M. Forster to dazzling life in the Florentine countryside and in the well-appointed homes of the English Edwardian upper classes. A comedy of manners with a quick wit and impeccable comic timing, A Room With A View is also a portrait of the quiet solitude that lies beneath Forster's characters, and of the need for human connection in a world of rigid convention.

The young Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch (played by Helena Bonham Carter), arrives in Florence on a Baedecker-style grand tour with her aunt Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). Through a series of events involving English expatriates Miss Eleanor Lavish, an unflappable novelist (Judi Dench), and the Emersons, a free-thinking father and son (played by Denholm Elliot and Julian Sands), Lucy's life is changed forever under a loggia in Florence and in the Tuscan countryside.

Lucy returns from her sentimental journey to her mother, brother, and their local vicar in England (played by Rosemary Leach, Rupert Graves, and Simon Callow) and attempts to resume her life as it was before her trip, consenting to an engagement with Cecil Vyse (played by Daniel Day Lewis), a bookish snob who never uses an English word when an Italian or italicized one would do. Lucy must then choose between an easy but untruthful life as Cecil's wife and one that will require a renunciation of all she has been taught at her childhood home at Windy Corner.

Ivory's delicate and playful direction spirits us from an adventure in the back alleys of Florence, lost with Dench and Smith, to the lace-parasolled rigidity of English lawn parties. Shot on location in and around Florence (including unforgettable scenes in the Piazza della Signoria and at Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce), A Room With A View made stars not only of Bonham Carter, Day Lewis and Sands, but of the Tuscan landscapes (as photographed by Tony Pierce - Roberts) and Puccini arias (as sung by Kiri Te Kanawa) featured throughout.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Oscar-lauded screenplay, to which the director contributed, continues to be regarded as one of the best literary adaptions ever written for the screen. Maggie Smith received an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Charlotte Bartlett as at once an incisive schoolmarm and a poignantly lonely woman; as did Denholm Elliot, for his childishly knowing portrait of Mr. Emerson.

Awards: BEST PICTURE, BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR (Daniel Day Lewis), National Board of Review. BEST SCREENPLAY (ADAPTED), ART DIRECTION, BEST COSTUME DESIGN. Academy Awards. BEST PICTURE, BESTACTRESS (Maggie Smith), BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Judi Dench), BAFTA. BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Maggie Smith), Golden Globs Awards. BEST FOREIGN FILM, Independent Spirit Awards. BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY, Writers Guild of America.

James Ivory, screenwriter of Call Me by Your Name, took home the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay at Sunday’s Academy Awards at the age of 89, making him the oldest recipient in the history of the Oscars. While this might have been Ivory’s first win, it certainly wasn’t his first nomination. The producer and director was previously in the running for Best Director for three of his Merchant Ivory films: 1985’s A Room with a View, 1992’s Howards End and 1993’s The Remains of the Day.