Merchant Ivory
There has been such an evolution in the history of cinema that the name Merchant Ivory can now be considered as a noun. It is derived from the names of Director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant who worked together from the 1960s until the death of Merchant in 2005. The critics use the word with hyphen to refer “to ‘costume dramas’ in general and any historical drama which the critics wish to belittle as being too well produced but too boring of a genre.” Often, when humor is used in that manner, one wonders if the authors actually know the source of the phrase and much less that it referred to a production company that for some two decades was about the closest thing to an assured always-full arthouse brand one could locate. About 42 movies were made under that banner by Merchant who happened to hail from Bombay. A total of 30 were directed by Ivory, a rather unassuming but tough man from Oregon.
All of them were written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who singularly qualified to have a movie made about her life, having been born to German Jewish parents in England, married an Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala and settled in New Delhi where she penned novels about india, including the Booker Prize winning Heat and Dust amongst others which Merchant Ivory adapted into a motion picture. The music for 21 of the films was written by Richard Robbins. This is quite an impressive level of vision maintaining unity as a group actually according to the standards of auteurist analysis.
It has been observed that the best production handled and brought out by Merchant Ivory was even in their first release of the best movies, “A Room with a view”, “Howard’s End”, “Maurice”, and “The Remains of the Day” would all be termed classics in any genre period. And a lot of the others, among them “Heat and Dust,” “The Bostonians,” “Surviving Picasso,” and “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” are surprises and are due for reintroduction. ‘Merchant Ivory’ produced by Steven Soucy followed by the two who started it will be warming to resonance to anyone who went to numerous arthouse cinemas during the 1980s and 90s, the peak of the pair’s popularity.
Nevertheless, the film works as a formal endorsement of the importance of the team members, even or especially when in some moments one gets the feeling of watching an interesting and well made box set extra about the key figures who worked on the films rather than a work which can be described as an all encompassing picture providing entertaining biography, history of a film production house, an intricate study of relationships between creative people and answering the question what exactly did the Merchant-Ivory team do that was so captivating to so many people. For those seeking a movie that describes the contribution of the constructive pair and their larger industry context, perhaps would be wise to seek out more information and read critiques of these films from several timelines.
But clearly the most interesting are the interviews which make this film a rather loose, unfocused, hence not the sharpest of the best Merchant Ivory films, but works as a ‘hangout movie’ of sorts, in this case straight non fiction.
No stranger to the Merchant Ivory productions, like many of his peers who are now household names, Hugh Grant, who played the charming lover in a key gay film of the eighties “Maurice”, recalls how even among well dressed, often elegantly clothed and quite beautiful women and men on the sets, there was this kind of suppressed desire that could be felt, and how the great Merchant’s. “You’d watch films terribly often get made and say, behind this film, where’s the money or who’s the money? and at that time, there was no money. He still got required to get it.” Furthermore, Vanessa Redgrave, who appeared in three of the couple’s combination of films (only two Merchant directed himself including ‘The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe’), was a very spiky influential control freak on the documentary set. Ivory’s ailment was well known to almost everyone, although he himself was not avowed, and later became the oldest Oscar-winning author in the world after cocreating the original script of the movie ‘Call me by Your name.’ Merchant was gay too and they were sex and professional partners throughout most their cooperation.
There are whispers of romantic melodrama that sullied the union, it is so complicated and sorrowful that it’s almost as if there is a desire for someone to make it into a work of fiction. (One of the eyewitnesses puts it as “distressing.”)
What makes this film more interesting are the captures of real-life events which were shot during the production stages and depict the comprehension between Ivory who looks like a pretty relaxed and responsive guy and Merchant who is relatively more spirited, if one may put it that way. There seems like a lot of conflict it is almost like the Force meets an Emovable Object, yet of course, there were countless layers of complexity. Merchant was the sort of producer who would be forever leaning over people to finish what they had started or to cut down on the unnecessary expenses here and there. Back in the day, he used to prepare all the dishes on his own in order to economize as much as possible. One of my favorite scenes comes from one of the behind the scenes sequences where Ivory is attempting to hire a hair and makeup artist to prepare people’s hands for the close-up shots of an organist’s fingers, and Merchant protests that it is not necessary to cover what is not going to be visible.
Filmmakers who often depict elegance and containment of power may find the phrase ‘down and dirty’ more suitable as compared to what most might think, but then this seems to hold true to each and every production to some extent.
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