This is my long overdue tribute to the great American director James Ivory, who is now 96. His films have lingered in my mind for several decades, even as I was delving into scores of other films, national cinemas and artistic traditions.
It was thanks to him that I first realised with his consummate second feature film, Shakespeare Wallah (1965), that the fallen British Raj is still in our veins. Every member of its large, multi-racial cast told an eloquent story about the impact British colonial rule and its end had on India; and what we – and they – were losing and relentlessly moving away from and towards.
It was also thanks to him that I experienced on screen the brilliance and profound insights of the classic novels by EM Forster and Henry James, and the equally superb more recent additions to this canon by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Kazuo Ishiguro. For instance, in A Room with a View (1985), Ivory vouchsafed to us not only the beauty of Florence, but much more deeply the joy of the discovery of first love. The kiss exchanged by Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in the sunlit Tuscan poppy field is an iconic cinema moment that anyone who has seen the film will always cherish as if she were present.
In The Remains of the Day (1993) – one of the finest titles of a novel – Ivory bared the servility, penchant for collaboration and the intricacies of the English class and caste system with an irony and distance that is uniquely his own, and the signature style of most of his period drama films. Though an American, Ivory understood England as well as he understood the equally stratified Indian society. He gave to great thespians some of their finest screen incarnations – Madhur Jaffrey, Shashi Kapoor, Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, Judy Dench, Maggie Smith, Anthony Hopkins, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward among many others.
And then there is, of course, the Indian connection from his first short films and debut feature, The Householder (1963) made with the help of his constant collaborator and partner Ismail Merchant. Not only were Shashi Kapoor and Leela Naidu in a sense a reprise of the young couple in Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar (1956), they lived and loved in our own times and in our moment of post-Independence India. Their joys and sorrows resonated poignantly with the new urban India’s alienation from its pastoral and much romanticised past.
Shakespeare Wallah, sublimely acted by Madhur Jaffrey, Shashi Kapoor and the entire Kendal family, was luminously photographed by Subrata Mitra and scored by Satyajit Ray, and is perhaps one of the great cinematic epitaphs of the end of an era – comparable even to Ray’s own Jalsaghar and Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons. Ivory then briefly flirted with the hippie movement in The Guru (1969) – with Rita Tushingham and Michael York – and paid homage to the lovely Helen in a documentary aptly titled Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls (1973) and Bombay’s colourful cinema in his erratic but lively Bombay Talkie (1970).
But soon his love of India was focused mainly on its tradition of miniature – or more accurately – its book and album painting. Ivory is an avid collector of these superlative paintings, and his collection once included a Nainsukh masterwork that is among this Pahari artist’s finest. It depicts the mortal remains of his patron Balwant Singh being honoured in a simple bluish grey tinted tent by two solemn attendants dressed in white. The tent and the landscape in the background represent, in the renowned art historian BN Goswamy’s exquisite phrase, “a metaphor for the great divide between the here and the beyond”.
The entertaining but minor, albeit personal, Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (1978) directly addressed Ivory’s interest in collecting Indian paintings. But perhaps his most touching portrayal of Indian princely families (whose ancestors had commissioned the miniature paintings) was Autobiography of a Princess (1975). Madhur Jaffrey acts as the imperious eponymous princess and her former British tutor (played by the aging James Mason in a superb piece of casting) recall the Raj by watching old newsreels over a tea-and-samosa party in her London apartment studded with its faded relics.
Very few Western directors (films by Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini for instance, and the more recent additions like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films by John Madden come to mind) have shown, as Ivory has, their love and sympathy for this land and its diverse and idiosyncratic peoples and manners in such a sympathetic and striking way.
I admire several of Ivory’s other films, most notably the anthology dance hall film Roseland (1977) and the adaptation of Jhabvala’s nostalgic British Raj novel Heat and Dust (1983). But when I think of the sad and wistful look in Felicity Kendal’s face as she leaves the shores of India in Shakespeare Wallah, I think of all the eras that have passed before, and are passing in front of our eyes even now.
James Ivory, who has retired from active filmmaking has left an enduring body of work and legacy – which extended to scripting Call Me by Your Name (2017) directed by Luca Guadagnino, which finally got him an Oscar as a scriptwriter!
If you open your eyes to the world of James Ivory, you will find not only a patrician tact and perfectly tuned period film conventions, but also a throbbing heart and a mighty understanding of what it is to live, and the evanescent beauty and scars it leaves behind.
