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."

A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is the story of an American family living in Paris in the mid sixties, told from the point of view of the daughter, Channe. The father, Bill Willis, is a successful expatriate writer (based on Kaylie Jones's father, the writer James Jones), a WWII veteran haunted by his experiences in the Pacific. His wife, Marcella, is an emotional, fun-loving woman. The film opens the day five-year old Benoit, a French orphan, is brought into the family for adoption.

Benôit's natural mother, an unmarried French girl who was only fifteen when her child was born, holds up the adoption proceedings out of feelings of guilt and remorse, thus terrifying the Willises with the possibility of Benôit's removal. Jealous, Channe retreats to the protective embraces of her Portuguese nanny Candida, who takes her frustrations out on the small boy. Benôit, who has been moved around from foster home to foster home, keeps his suitcase packed, ready at a moment's notice to be sent back to the orphanage. It is only after much tenderness and reassurance from Bill and Marcella that Benôit relinquishes his suitcase, and asks to have his name changed to Billy.

Against the backdrop of their parents' poker games and all-night parties, the children grow up attending a bilingual school where they struggle to be accepted. When necessary, Marcella intervenes at school, defending her children with a fierce loyalty and railing at the form-obsessed French teachers. Still, Billy wants - more than anything else in the world - to be American. Just as Channe reaches puberty, she is befriended by a sensitive and artistic boy names Francis Fortescue. Francis is fatherless, somewhat effeminate, and the son of an expatriate American mother. They become inseparable. Billy thinks Francis is weird, but Channe admires Francis' knowledge of opera, his ability to tell dramatic stories, and his courage in always being frank and up front. As sexual maturity overtakes Channe, the friendship becomes strained, and Francis, who is excluded from the school's teen-age party scene, becomes more and more withdrawn and morose as Channe looks romantically to the other boys. Their friendship collapses just as Bill announces that at the end of the school year, the family will be returning to the U.S. He explains that a congenital heart problem is getting worse, and he wants to be under the care of American doctors. The children's entire world is suddenly and unceremoniously left behind.

In Sagaponack, Long Island, on Labor Day weekend, the Willises arrive at their new home, an old farm house in the middle of vast, green potato fields. Bill teaches Channe how to drive, continues the tradition of all-night poker games, and plays down Marcella's fears about his family's history of heart disease. Channe and Billy attend the local high school, fitting in no better than they did in Paris. Channe begins having sex in the backseats of cars, searching for acceptance and attention. Unsure of herself, she shares intimate conversations with her father about boys and girls and sex. Bill tries to guide her way but feels powerless; he is getting worse, and is preoccupied with trying to finish his final novel about WWII.

Ivory's initial effort as a filmmaker was Venice: Theme and Variations, a documentary made as his master's thesis at the USC film school that, although only 28 minutes long, is rich in composition and aesthetic texture. Picturesque buildings along the canals are mirrored in the undulating reflection of water below them; a figure in darkened bronze atop a bell tower strikes a huge bell with a long-handled hammer, tolling the hour; boatmen are observed on the lagoons in the bluish haze of dusk. These glimpses of present-day Venice alternate with passages in which the paintings Ivory has photographed accompanied by mood-setting music - from Gabrieli, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, and Chopin - present artists' views of Venice over centuries of time.

Opening sequences consist of the mosaics in St. Mark's and Gentile Bellini's depictions of early Venetians still firm in their faith; and of scenes from Carpaccio, of a lighter narrative line, which draw attention to the daily life being lived in the palazzi and squares of the old city. The changing milieu of Venice is then traced from the sixteenth century, when the city was an important center of wealth and trade, to the eighteenth, portrayed by Guardi and Longhi, when Venice had entered into an irrevocable decline. Ivory admits that it was the eighteenth century "that interested me most, Guardi and Longhi"; and it is a period certainly that offers an unusually rich sense of Venetian society, with its world of the theater, of carnival, and other diversions that give it a strong sense of atmosphere, place and moment. He brings the story of Venice up to our time, via Whistler, and concludes with the cartoonist Saul Steinberg's satirical drawings of today's Venice, with it's armies of tourists, competing tango orchestras in St. Mark's Square, and the ever-present boatmen, now mostly motorized.

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.