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."

After Shakespeare Wallah, Merchant Ivory became interested in two movie projects that in the end failed to materialize. One was a sequel to Shakespeare Wallah called A Lovely World, which followed the fortunes of Lizzie Buckingham in the trendy London of the 1960s. Filmways commissioned Jhabvala to do the screenplay but when it was completed turned it down and the project was shelved. The other was to be a screen version of the novel Vertical and Horizontal (1963) by Lillian Ross, the well-known profile writer for The New Yorker. A comedy about upper-middle-class Jewish life in New York, the novel features an incompetent psychiatrist named Dr. Blauberman and his patient Dr. Spencer Fifield, a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor internist whose program for his life is a purely intellectual construction. As a satire of people who cannot see others as they are, or establish connections with them, Vertical and Horizontal might have fit into Merchant Ivory's ironic world; but after Ross prepared a screenplay for Paramount, the studio never proceeded with the film. Another studio, Twentieth Century Fox, then offered Merchant Ivory the finance for their third feature, The Guru. This film was in a way the reverse of the theme of Shakespeare Wallah. This time it is the British who come to India for enlightenment in all things artistic and inspirational, instead of the other way around. A young English pop star named Tom Pickle, played by Michael York, goes to India to learn to play the sitar (a situation that parallels the real-life musical quest of George Harrison, who become the pupil of Ravi Shankar in the late 1960's). Pickle has all sorts of adventures, the greatest of which is his stormy encounter with his guru: he cannot develop the necessary meekness of spirit that the study of Indian music requires, and in the end he returns to England accompanied by a young English girl (Rita Tushingham) that he meets on his travels.

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.