August 30, 2024
FILM: MERCHANT IVORY
DIRECTED BY: STEPHEN SOUCY
STARRING: JAMES IVORY, HELENA BONHAM CARTER, EMMA THOMPSON
RATING: 4 out of 4 stars
By Dan Pal
During the 1980s and early 1990s if you knew anything about British cinema of the time you knew about Merchant Ivory. If, like me, you heard their names keep coming up at the Oscars, you knew something about Merchant Ivory. A new documentary traces the history of the professional and personal relationship between Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. The two men not only created a unique genre of films associated with their names, like Scorsese, Tarantino, and others have, but they also lived together for over forty years.
Merchant Ivory begins with a bang bringing together snippets of interviews with the many actors who worked with the couple, including Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, and Vanessa Redgrave. We also get clips from some of the 40+ films the producer (Merchant) and director (Ivory) made from 1961 until 2005. This serves as a great introduction to the team before documentary director Stephen Soucy takes us to their earliest beginnings as filmmakers and as a couple. There are clips from their early works before they became household names with the Oscar-winning 1986 film, A Room with a View which set their careers into the international stratosphere.
To prepare myself for this documentary I re-watched some of their subsequent films such as Maurice, Howard’s End, and The Remains of the Day. I had never seen A Room with a View before and I have to say it may now be my favorite. As the documentary makes clear the basic thematic and stylistic elements of the duo’s most successful films were solidified by A Room with a View. We are talking about period films, based on novels featuring lavish settings, criticisms of British aristocracy, exquisitely designed costumes, and impeccable music scores. It’s also quite funny, which isn’t necessarily true of most of their works. While the documentary primarily focuses on Merchant and Ivory, there are some great portraits included of their many key collaborators such as screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins. How they crafted these films together is well documented through clips and interviews both from the period in which the films were made through today.
All of this alone would make Merchant Ivory necessary viewing for film students and fans of the filmmakers’ works. Some of it is especially enlightening including the difficulties they often had raising money for their films and Merchant’s incredibly persuasive ways to get the works made regardless of cost. If you want to know what a producer does, explore Merchant’s approach through this film.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film though are the discussions concerning the relationship Merchant and Ivory had together. Merchant was from a strict Muslim family in India. While Ivory was American, he relays how they couldn’t talk about their life together in the same ways same-sex couples can do today, yet most people knew they were together. It becomes very clear that they bantered and argued like any couple while also creating significant works of art. One of those films, Maurice, was based on a novel by E.M. Forster about two English young men who fall in love while studying at Cambridge. Merchant and Ivory were able to go places with the story of same-sex love that cinema had not gone by 1987. (Although, even A Room with a View from the previous year has a pretty extended scene in which three men playfully run naked around a lake.) Basically, the filmmakers went for raw emotion and intimacy about earlier periods that was never previously addressed in the same manner within society or on screen.
The documentary also has some juicy bits about some of the difficulties they had with actress Vanessa Redgrave and their various money issues and affairs. But overall, this is an excellent look at a producer/director team which had a huge impact on cinema during the late 20th Century and who also remained devoted to each other as a couple until Merchant died in 2005.
Merchant Ivory opens today in select theaters, including the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago. It expands more widely in the following weeks.
FILM: MERCHANT IVORY
DIRECTED BY: STEPHEN SOUCY
STARRING: JAMES IVORY, HELENA BONHAM CARTER, EMMA THOMPSON
RATING: 4 out of 4 stars
By Dan Pal
During the 1980s and early 1990s if you knew anything about British cinema of the time you knew about Merchant Ivory. If, like me, you heard their names keep coming up at the Oscars, you knew something about Merchant Ivory. A new documentary traces the history of the professional and personal relationship between Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. The two men not only created a unique genre of films associated with their names, like Scorsese, Tarantino, and others have, but they also lived together for over forty years.
Merchant Ivory begins with a bang bringing together snippets of interviews with the many actors who worked with the couple, including Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, and Vanessa Redgrave. We also get clips from some of the 40+ films the producer (Merchant) and director (Ivory) made from 1961 until 2005. This serves as a great introduction to the team before documentary director Stephen Soucy takes us to their earliest beginnings as filmmakers and as a couple. There are clips from their early works before they became household names with the Oscar-winning 1986 film, A Room with a View which set their careers into the international stratosphere.
To prepare myself for this documentary I re-watched some of their subsequent films such as Maurice, Howard’s End, and The Remains of the Day. I had never seen A Room with a View before and I have to say it may now be my favorite. As the documentary makes clear the basic thematic and stylistic elements of the duo’s most successful films were solidified by A Room with a View. We are talking about period films, based on novels featuring lavish settings, criticisms of British aristocracy, exquisitely designed costumes, and impeccable music scores. It’s also quite funny, which isn’t necessarily true of most of their works. While the documentary primarily focuses on Merchant and Ivory, there are some great portraits included of their many key collaborators such as screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins. How they crafted these films together is well documented through clips and interviews both from the period in which the films were made through today.
All of this alone would make Merchant Ivory necessary viewing for film students and fans of the filmmakers’ works. Some of it is especially enlightening including the difficulties they often had raising money for their films and Merchant’s incredibly persuasive ways to get the works made regardless of cost. If you want to know what a producer does, explore Merchant’s approach through this film.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film though are the discussions concerning the relationship Merchant and Ivory had together. Merchant was from a strict Muslim family in India. While Ivory was American, he relays how they couldn’t talk about their life together in the same ways same-sex couples can do today, yet most people knew they were together. It becomes very clear that they bantered and argued like any couple while also creating significant works of art. One of those films, Maurice, was based on a novel by E.M. Forster about two English young men who fall in love while studying at Cambridge. Merchant and Ivory were able to go places with the story of same-sex love that cinema had not gone by 1987. (Although, even A Room with a View from the previous year has a pretty extended scene in which three men playfully run naked around a lake.) Basically, the filmmakers went for raw emotion and intimacy about earlier periods that was never previously addressed in the same manner within society or on screen.
The documentary also has some juicy bits about some of the difficulties they had with actress Vanessa Redgrave and their various money issues and affairs. But overall, this is an excellent look at a producer/director team which had a huge impact on cinema during the late 20th Century and who also remained devoted to each other as a couple until Merchant died in 2005.
Merchant Ivory opens today in select theaters, including the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago. It expands more widely in the following weeks.