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."

After Bombay Talkie, Merchant Ivory turned next to a documentary. BBC television commissioned them to do a film on Nirad Chaudhuri, the celebrated Indian polymath whom Merchant, Ivory, and Jhabvala had all known in India, and who was then in England doing research for a book on the Sanskrit scholar Max Müeller. Chaudhuri is clearly an extraordinary man. His interests are not only cross-cultural (he is a brilliant commentator on comparative cultures of India and the West), but also interdisciplinary--involving history, anthropology, linguistics, political science, sociology, and a half-dozen other fields. He can talk on any subject under the sun. Chaudhuri is also a passionate Anglophile, as he proclaimed in his book A Passage to England, one of whose chapter titles provides the title of the documentary.

In the 54-minute film, Ivory observes the diminutive (he is only five feet tall), seventy-six-year-old scholar in the settings of Oxford and London. Ivory places him in a number of situations: a dinner party, a don's study, a visit to a graveyard, a fitting at a tailor's, a walk along the town's High Street--and lets him talk. Nimble-witted and voluble, he expounds on everything from the beauties of his beloved Mozart to the misrule, or rather the lack of any rule at all, of India; from his passion for Kipling (the best of all English writers on India, he maintains) to the vacuousness of the yoga cult and the intellectually damaging effects of the Indian diet, deficient in protein. His spryness as a walker of Oxford's streets is matched by his biting and provocative opinions, which he appears to relish. He becomes a self-creating portrait; and Ivory, in fact, regards the film, so concise and yet so full of life, as a "profile."

The first of Merchant Ivory's triptych of Henry James adaptations (including The Bostonians in 1984 and The Golden Bowl in 2001), The Europeans is the story of an encounter between a family of pre-Civil War New Englanders and their European relations whose alien, sophisticated ways dazzle some family members and scandalize others. The Baroness Eugenia Muenster (Lee Remick) arrives with her artistic and dashing brother Felix (Tim Woodward) for a transatlantic visit with their cousins, the Wentworths. The bohemian Felix is immediately taken with Gertrude Wentworth (Lisa Eichhorn), James's "innocent Sabbath-breaker," who is being courted by the earnest but tiresome Puritan suitor Mr. Brand (Norman Snow). Eugenia fixes upon the reserved and attractive Robert Acton (Robin Ellis), who is torn between his captivation with the Baroness and his distrust of her European worldliness. The resulting conflicts and complications in the Wentworth and Acton houses come to play out James's vision of America trying to maintain her innocence by fending off European influences. The characters must somehow forge relationships and identities somewhere between the grave sobriety of Puritan acseticism, its "thousand different ways to be dreary," and the perceived amoral or outright immoral decadence of the Continent. The widely acclaimed performances, led by Remick's complex Eugenia, lend subtle sympathy to the characters. They are enabled by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay, which never betrays James's wit or delicate command of social subtext. Ivory gives a sense of lyrical simplicity to his scenes in the New England interiors of the period, but perhaps most striking are his exteriors, which capture Henry James's sense of ambivalent wonder at the New World. The expatriate author of The Europeans was fascinated by the New England landscape, which he called "Arcadian" and "idyllic" but also depicted as a "void" and a "vacancy." The film's setting amidst the striking reds and oranges of the New England autumn gives us a sense of a place that is both edenic and unfulfilled - - a world in advent, people waiting for something.

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.