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 1961, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory paid a visit to the German-born novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, then living in Delhi, with a proposal to make a film of her novel The Householder. Jhabvala agreed. She wrote the screenplay for the film herself, in ten days, and the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala partnership was inaugurated.

Filmed entirely on location in Delhi, The Householder is a comedy that revolves around Prem (Shashi Kapoor), a young teacher at a boys' college who has been married to the beautiful but retiring Indu (Leela Naidu). Little more than a boy himself, at least in the face of his imperious, impossible mother (Durga Khote), Prem struggles with the burden of his responsibilites as a husband and, when Indu becomes pregnant, with his impending duties as a father. Prem's fumbling and his mother's constant belittling become too much for Indu to bear, and she leaves her husband to return to her family home. Left alone with his mother (who delights in her newfound umbilical arrangement), Prem seeks enlightenment from an older married man, from a swami, and from Westerners who have come to India with orientalist illusions and Silk Road naivété. Only then, in Indu's absence, does Prem fall in love with his wife.

Kapoor and Naidu anchor the film with their genuineness as young innocents coming into conflict with tradition; Khote is relentlessly effective as the orthodox Hindu matriarch who never loses an opportunity to recite her own martyrology or criticize her daughter-in-law's housekeeping. The film is a satire and social commentary, but it has also become a historical document of sorts, a record of a now vanished India captured at the moment just before the disappearance of traditional urban middle and upper-middle class life.

The Indian master-director Satyajit Ray was a major influence on The Householder(Ray himself supervised the music and re-cut the film for Merchant and Ivory). His legendary cameraman, Subatra Mitra, was the director of photography, and the film is infused with the fluid, restrained lyricism that characterizes Ray's work - though in its rhythms and its characters The Householder announces a style of Ivory's own. In these characters - people struggling with a changing society - are hints of some Merchant Ivory personae who will later emerge on other continents: through Prem and Indu we glimpse those rarely-explored places between education and adulthood that are the territory of Henry James; in Prem's mother we see the Forsterian doyenne-tyrant; and throughout The Householder we are brought to that space between cultures that would be the province of later Merchant Ivory films from Shakespeare Wallah(1965) to A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries(1998).

Even before Picasso's death in 1973, some of those who knew him, including at least two of the women who shared his life, had published their personal accounts of what it was like to be intimate with the greatest artistic genius of the twentieth century. The most striking of these was Francoise Gilot's Life with Picasso, which appeared in 1964 despite Picasso's strenuous efforts to block its publication on the grounds that it was an intolerable intrusion on his privacy. Gilot depicts Picasso as a man with an imperial ego who often made the women in his life his victims or martyrs. "Pablo's many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar," she writes, "as well as their continuous presence just offstage in our own life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he had collected in his little private museum." The comparison to Bluebeard may go too far, but there is no denying the high casualty rate among the women whom stood too near Picasso. His first wife, Olga Koklova, went insane; Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself; Dora Maar sank into temporary madness; and Jacqueline Roque, Picasso's wife in the final part of his life, shot herself. Gilot, after a ten-year relationship (from 1943 to 1953) and two children by him, was the only woman with enough strength of will to leave Picasso.

Thus the title of the film, and its plot-line: world-famous artist (in his sixties) meets independent young artist (in her twenties), and charms her into becoming his partner, muse, and mother of his children. When his feelings for her cool, and he turns mean, she walks out, not wanting to become a dreary victim, like her predecessors.

Just as Picasso went to court (unsuccessfully) to stop Gilot's book, so his heirs tried to stop the making of this film. They, too, failed, but the viewer should not expect to see any of Picasso's masterpieces: in a gesture more and more common these days as filmmakers announce their plans to make films about modern artists, Picasso's estate banned any reproduction of his art in Surviving Picasso.

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.