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 completing Quartet, Merchant and Ivory returned to India, where they prepared two movies during 1981-82. The more modestly scaled, and the first to be released (in January 1983), was the 73-minute documentary (or "docudrama," as Merchant refers to it) The Courtesans of Bombay, which was both produced and directed by Merchant. (The other was Heat and Dust). Merchant first knew of the courtesans at an early age, he says, "from the visits from them we used to have during weddings at home, celebrations of childbirth, and other festivities. They provided the entertainment of singing and dancing, and I used to watch them." Then at the age of sixteen he was taken by school friends to Pavan Pool, an enclosed area of Bombay where the courtesans performed before a male audience, an experience that remained vividly in his memory and that he now wished to record on film.

Merchant Ivory's production deal with Disney also envisioned Merchant Ivory films directed and scripted by people other than Ivory and Jhabvala; the first of these was Feast of July, produced by Merchant on an $8 million budget and released by Disney's Buena Vista/Touchstone Pictures in 1995. It is taken from the 1954 novel by H.E. Bates, one of England's most prolific modern writers and a novelist often compared to Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. Like many other Bates novels, Feast of July is set in the turn-of-the-century English Midlands, a rural region that by then had become industrialized. It is an austere, foreboding novel that has now, with a faithful screenplay by Christopher Neame and skillful direction by Christopher Menaul, become an austere, foreboding film. The picture begins with a young woman, Bella Ford (Embeth Davidtz) struggling alone across the windy high country and giving birth to a stillborn baby in a deserted cabin. She has been seduced and abandoned by a young man, a moral lightweight named Arch Wilson, and as the story opens had been in search of the town where Wilson told her he lived.

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.