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."

In the entracte between world wars, Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) is the perfect English butler at the estate of the politically-inclined Lord Darlington (James Fox). Stevens's obsessively dutiful, thoroughly unsentimental way of life is challenged with the arrival of the new housekeeper Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), who is as spirited as she is capable. Stevens's myopic worldview, his unequivocal loyalty to his master, comes to blows with Miss Kenton's sense of moral outrage as Lord Darlington is made an unwitting Nazi pawn. While England wavers between "peace in our time" appeasement and war against Hitler, Darlington Hall becomes the fulcrum upon which the fate of the continent rests and Stevens, who has spent his adult life more concerned with attending to his master than with attending to his own personal happiness, begins to awaken to the possibility of a relationship with Miss Kenton.

Based on the 1989 Booker Prize winning novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The Remains of the Day is told in a series of flashbacks as Stevens, near the end of his life, makes a trip across the English countryside for a meeting that he hopes might reconcile his past mistakes.

Hopkins received an Academy Award nomination for his subtle and penetrating portrayal of Stevens: in his tight shoulders and breathy hesitations, Hopkins discovers a deep humanity in a man who would leave his father's deathbed to wait on his master at a dinner gathering. His rapport with Thompson, who also received an Oscar nomination, creates some of the most iconic and psychologically charged romantic tension in recent film history. The supporting cast includes Hugh Grant as Lord Darlington's nephew, the enterprising journalist Cardinal; and Christopher Reeve as the American politician who tries to open the eyes of the English aristocracy to the imminent Nazi threat.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala received an Oscar nomination for her transformation of Ishiguro's first-person narrative into a drama that preserves the ironies of Stevens's interior landscape while expanding the socio-political world he inhabits. Impeccably photographed by Tony Pierce-Roberts on location in four great English houses (principally at Badminton House in Avon and Powderham Castle in Devon), the film's lavash interiors are not only a visual flourish but a dramatic element: as the fate of the world is decided in its rooms, Darlington Hall becomes a catalogue of all European civilization, which hangs in the balance of the Nazi threat.

The senior reviewer of The New York Times called The Remains of the Day the "deepest, most heartbreakingly real of the many extraordinary films directed by James Ivory." Ivory won Director's Guild of America, Golden Globe, and Oscar nominations for his work. The film is pervaded with the air of something lost, both in the England of Stevens's road trip -- in pub chatter, in bedside photographs of the war dead -- and in the butler's missed opportunities. In an often--quoted scene, Stevens refuses to reveal to Miss Kenton the title of the book he is reading; persistent, she eventually peels his fingers away to find a sentimental love story. Stevens can only bring himself to say that he is reading it to increase his vocabulary. It is one of the cinema's most affecting portraits of solitude, regret, and the tragedy of what might have been.

Adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her Booker Prize-winning novel , Heat and Dust is the story of two English women living in India more than fifty years apart. Olivia (Greta Scacchi) shares a troubled marriage with Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove), an English civil servant in the colonial India of the 1920s. Anne, Olivia's grand niece (Julie Christie), comes to the subcontinent -- thirty years after the sun has set on the British empire -- to investigate Olivia's life, which her family regarded as "something dark and terrible."

Shortly after her passage to India in 1923, the beautiful young Olivia finds herself bored by English colonial social circles -- she wonders how people who lead such exciting lives could remain so dull --though she is entranced by India itself. Olivia is introduced to the Nawab of Khatm (Shashi Kapoor), a romantic and decadent minor prince who enjoys a Forsterian intimacy with his British confidant, Harry (Nickolas Grace). The willful Englishwoman begins going to Khatm to spend time with the Nawab and they fall in love, engaging in an affair that is not without wrenching consequences in her public and private lives.

In the present day of the film, Anne investigates Olivia's past with Inder Lal (Zakir Hussain), her Indian landlord. Anne finds herself both in the same rooms and in the same predicament as her ancestress, as she herself becomes involved in a romantic entangelment with an Indian man. Heat and Dust cross-cuts between the lives of the two women as Anne discovers -- and then seems to repeat -- the scandal that her independent-minded ancestor caused two generations before. Anne must then re-assert her own independence, fifty years later.

The supporting cast of the film includes Madhur Jaffrey as the Begum, the Nawab's manipulative mother who holds court like a lioness among the purdah ladies; Charles McCaughan as Chid, the American sanyasi and would-be holy man; Patrick Godfrey as Dr. Saunders, in the first of his many turns as an uncompromising Englishman for Merchant Ivory; and Jennifer Kendal as his childless and mirthless wife.

Jhabvala writes in her novel that, to Olivia, being in India "was like being not in a different part of this world but in another world altogether, in another reality." Scacchi's radiant performance never ceases to convey her wonder at the brave new world she finds in the colonial subcontinent, even late in the film when that view is tempered by the reality of an impossible dilemma. Her on-screen chemistry with Shashi Kapoor, who gives a textured portrayal of a outlaw prince, is apparent from their first moment of eye contact . In the present day of the film, Christie brings a warmth and intelligence to Anne that is at once sensuous and true to the thoughtful voice of Jhabvala's novel.

The India of Heat and Dust is a balance of visual splendor and the understated ironies that are characteristic of Ivory-Jhabvala work. Merchant spares nothing in the production values -- we move from ornate banquets in 1923 to breathtaking vistas in present-day Kashmir -- yet the film's grand exteriors provide the backdrop to closely observed interior lives. The director views India with a lens that is equally informed by his lyrical early work on the subcontinent (The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah), and by his later penetrating social scenes of Henry James and Jean Rhys (The Europeans, Quartet). Richard Robbins provides the music and the score is among his best, employing Indian master musicians in arrangements that bridge Indian classical with 1920s period songs.

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.