Rediscovering the works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.
W hat’s heaven like?” the little boy asks his dad. “Oh, it’s a quiet place, very green and peaceful,” the father replies, “People sit about talking in low voices to each other while gentle music plays in the background. Nothing much happens.” Comprehension dawns on the lad’s face. “You mean heaven is a Merchant-Ivory film?” he exclaims.
Needless to say, this old joke isn’t meant as a compliment to the mannered, occasionally static style of filmmaking that was the hallmark of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s productions: a style that sometimes reduced a film to a visual equivalent of literature — like a stage production recorded by a motionless video camera — without exploring the medium’s possibilities.
It’s unwise to make generalisations about an artistic collaboration that spanned nearly five decades, and while browsing a new series of Merchant-Ivory DVDs it struck me that their oeuvre is vaster, more varied than the casual movie-watcher realises. Apart from the early, “Indian” films like The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah and the recent, critically acclaimed ones such as Howards End and Remains of the Day, it includes several under-seen mid-period movies like
The Europeans, Roseland and Quartet. Now these are available on DVDs priced between Rs 149 and Rs 199, and there’s always a good chance you’ll come across a little gem that you had never heard of. My own serendipitous Merchant-Ivory discovery was their English-language film Bombay Talkie (1970), starring real-life couple Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendal as a Hindi-film star and an American romance novelist respectively. Seen as a whole, this movie — a commentary on the Bombay film industry — is uneven in tone, but as a collection of vignettes it’s delightful.
For starters, the opening credits sequence is one of the loveliest I’ve ever seen. The first shot shows a façade of the old Taj Mahal hotel, with the camera slowly moving in on the streets below until we see a group of men carrying a large billboard with the film’s title. The rest of the sequence features similar billboards and posters with delicately drawn group portraits of every member of the cast and crew (right down to the junior artistes) along with their names.
This is enhanced by Shanker-Jaikishen’s music score and Subrata Mitra’s camerawork, which places the posters against the background of various Bombay vistas. For the movie buff who’s interested in the period or in the Kapoor-Kendal pairing, there’s a lot to treasure: the clever, self-referential contrasting of the two aspects of Shashi Kapoor’s career (the mainstream hero clowning about in assembly-line films versus the more serious actor-producer who worked with the likes of Shyam Benegal and, of course, Merchant-Ivory); the marvellously surreal scene where chorus dancers (including Helen as herself) rehearse on the keys of a giant typewriter; a glimpse of the young Usha Uthup (then known as Usha Iyer) singing; the young Jalal Agha performing the folksong “Mere Angne Mein” (10 years before Amitabh Bachchan made it famous) along with a hilarious, jugalbandi-style rendition of “Baa Baa Black Sheep”.
Though flawed by its attempt to simultaneously imitate Hindi-film melodrama, Bombay Talkie is valuable for its foreshadowing of “crossover cinema”. It’s also a good way to discover a new side to Merchant-Ivory.
(DVD Extra: an interview about the film with Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and writer Ruth-Prawer Jhabvala.)
