Joyce Glasser reviews Merchant Ivory (December 6, 2024) Cert 12A, 111 minutes – in cinemas
Stephen Soucy’s documentary Merchant Ivory is a basic and comprehensive, if uninspired portrait of the personal and professional partnership whose impact on British culture at the end of the 20th century was so significant that the company name became synonymous with a British film genre.
Characterised by genteel, Edwardian literary adaptations exploring class and disillusionment with beautiful costumes and sets, they often feature a symbolic house and characters in doomed relationships. This veneer was at odds with the shambolic chaos and budgetary battles that characterised principal photography.
With James Ivory, now 96, as Executive Producer, we are ensured accuracy, amusing anecdotes and high-profile talking heads gushing with praise. They subversively reveal vows of “never again” uttered by fed-up actors and staff before countering that the vows were short lived. The documentary would benefit from in depth analyses of the themes of the films and improved pacing and editing.
While it’s convenient to compare this golden partnership to that of, say, Powell & Pressburger, this was more of a quartet and the notion of homogeneity and Britishness was deceptive. Merchant was an Indian Muslim, Ivory was a Protestant American, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the scriptwriter of half of their productions, was in fact a German born American Jew whose family fled the Nazis.
The fourth “partner” was American prodigy Richard Stephen Robbins who composed the noteworthy music to the Merchant Ivory films from The Europeans in 1979. His romantic involvement with Merchant, and perhaps Ivory, too, is briefly noted.
And so to the basics. It all began in New York City in 1961, appropriately enough, at the Indian Consulate when Ivory and Merchant had just completed their respective short films. If not love at first sight, they hit it off and went to see a film by Satyajit Ray who would, for many years, assist them in their productions. In true Merchant Ivory impromptu fashion, a few weeks after meeting, the duo went to Delhi to make their first feature film.
The goal was to make English language films in India aimed at the international market. At first, they did just that as their arrival coincided with Prawer Jhabvala’s third novel, The Householder, which they filmed in 1963, based on her script.
Although Ismail Merchant directed films later in life, perhaps to the detriment of the company, his primary role in Merchant Ivory was producer, while Ivory directed.
Soucy’s talks to Ivory about how the pair navigated their still illicit homosexual relationship within their families and in public, and emphases their contrasting personalities and styles. Ivory, with his taste for British culture and literary fiction, was, by contrast to the animated, garrulous Merchant, calm, quiet and laid back, allowing the actors to do the work they were paid for.
Merchant was a brilliant, archetypal independent producer: intellectual, charismatic, sociable, with a lethal dose of charm and determination. The stories of making films on credit cards, starting production without all the financing in place, and paying the cast and crew with cash stuffed in a plastic bag – or not being able to pay them – turned the loveable but maddening Merchant into a legend.
In Shakespeare Wallah necessity was the mother of invention. Ivory recalls being relieved when they ran out of money halfway through due to soaring temperatures. Budgetary constraints meant the film was shot in black and white, increasing the authenticity of the film loosely based on the life of Geoffrey Kendall and his travelling troupe of Shakespearian performers. To cut costs the family played themselves, with Geoffrey’s daughter Felicity Kendall falling in love with Merchant Ivory regular Shashi Kapoor, who had starred in The Householder.
Kapoor reappeared in Heat and Dust, in 1983, their most ambitious film to date and one whose crumbling financing nearly brought down the company. Based on Prawer Jhabvala’s novel that won the Booker Prize in 1975 and sent her and her Indian architect husband to settle in New York, the film introduced the world to Greta Scacchi who was BAFTA nominated. The company’s first commercial success, it paved the way for European/English set productions, A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993).
Soucy points out that while on the surface the films seem to celebrate English upper-middle-class tradition, they were in fact critical, pointing out the hypocrisy, tensions and repressed desires. In the EM Forster adaptation Howard’s End, the smug, tunnel-visioned Wilcox family look down on the liberal, artistic Schlegels, but in the end it is the Schlegels whose moral superiority wins our respect.
If Emma Thompson won the Oscar for Best Actress for Howard’s End, in which her chemistry with Anthony Hopkins created subtle sparks the pair missed out on the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, where they were reunited. So did the film in general which was nominated for eight Academy Awards but lost out in all categories, mainly to Schindler’s List and The Piano.
Soucy devotes time to the ill-fated and controversial Forster adaptation Maurice, with its beautiful cast of young Hugh Grant, James Wilby and Rupert Graves. This faintly autobiographical story about a homosexual relationship was as taboo in 1909 Cambridge as it was in Thatcher’s Britain at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Filling us in on the unsung later films, now properly financed with American money, Soucy covers the deaths of Merchant in 2005, of Robbins in 2012 and Prawer Jhabvala in 2013. At nearly 90, Ivory rallied, at the 90th Academy Awards, finally winning his first Oscar, not for Best Director, but for his adaptation of Call Me by Your Name – the oldest winner in any category in history. In his short, tearful acceptance speech, he attributes his award to Prawer Jhabvala (who had won two herself) and Ismail Merchant.
The film clips in Merchant Ivory will whet your appetite for more, so do follow this link to find out more and for programming details.
