MERCHANT IVORY*****

Stephen Sourcy has directed the definitive documentary of the iconic and important film-making collective known as Merchant Ivory. It might be best known to audiences for Oscar-winning costume dramas like A ROOM WITH A VIEW and REMAINS OF THE DAY, but the body of work is so much more expansive, impressive and influential than that. Merchant Ivory began making contemporary films in post-independence India that captured something of the life of diverse creatives in that era.  Only later did they turn to adapting Henry James and EM Forster, earning their reputation for handsomely filmed costume drama. Even after that, they made films set in contemporary New York. And most recently, for a younger generation, James Ivory finally earned his Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for CALL ME BY YOUR NAME.

The collective met entirely by chance. James Ivory was a young Waspy American who longed to create theatre productions, and almost fell into film directing on the side. He met Ismael Merchant, a young muslim Indian in New York, and they became lovers and collaborators.  Ivory directed, Merchant produced. Ivory had a meticulous eye for detail and gave actors room to breathe. Merchant had a knack of charming and cajoling people for money to create movies that looked luxurious on a shoestring budget.

Over the years they added to their film-making family. First came Ruth Prawer Jhabwala, a German jew who had escaped to England, married a persian Indian and become a writer of great renown in her own right. She gave Merchant Ivory her ability to write screenplays of piercing insight and subtle sedition. The last of the quartet was the composer Richard Robbins, who at some point became Ismael's lover too - a relationship that James likens to a muslim man taking on a second wife. 

Of course, for decades the fact that this powerhouse director-producer couple were an actual couple was not discussed publicly. It was the screenwriting equivalent of "Don't ask, don't tell" to protect conservative families and presumably career prospects too. And yet, behind all of this, Ivory claims he never felt any shame at being gay, and on the back of the wild success of A ROOM WITH A VIEW, they tackled E.M. Forster's explicitly gay novel MAURICE. That was a desperately important film, made as was against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic and the fierce conservative backlash against homosexuals.  

The documentary benefits from an insightful use of archival material as well as a plethora of new interviews. Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson are the most fascinating and insightful of the actors, and Anthony Hopkins is notably absent. But I really loved hearing from people who were long time collaborators behind the lens - make-up and costume designers and others who describe beautifully the charm and frustration of working for no money - and the learning experience from James Ivory's exquisite taste.

So the film is admiring, but not hagiography. The strange nature of the core relationship is explored as much as Ivory will allow. The weird overlap of personal and professional is interrogated, as is the strangulation of Ismael's desire to live with Richard Robbins.  You sense there is a steel under the refinement of James Ivory. 

But ultimately, this is a laudatory and glorious film that not only revisits the iconic fan favourites but hopefully will guide them toward the full back catalogue. It made me want to revisit JEFFERSON IN PARIS, which the critics panned, but looks sumptuous now - like a Kubrick period piece. Overall, it made me appreciate the real genius and danger of their superficially beautiful films. Like Agatha Christie, who is often portrayed as writing twee, safe, puzzle books, Merchant Ivory films are far more slippery, dangerous things. They deserve revisiting.

MERCHANT IVORY played BFI Flare 2024 and will get a US release at some point this year. It has a running time of 112 minutes.

iPad Round-Up 5 - MADE IN DAGHENHAM

History is written in broad brush-strokes, with the industrial revolution depicted as a battle between capital and workers.  But as an early scene in MADE IN DAGENHAM shows, by the late 1960s - a period we can now see as the dying breath of the British union movement - both capital and workers had settled into cosy set-pieces and horse-trading with white men on either side.   In this film those roles are played by Kenneth Cranham as the Union boss and Rupert Graves as the Ford boss. They are meeting to discuss equal pay for women, and both presume that the women's token representative, played by Sally Hawkins, should simply shut up and let the men decide what's what. That calcified system was ultimately dismantled by a woman - Margaret Thatcher - but she only got the political mandate to do so after the country had been brought to its knees in the mid-70s.  This movie takes place earlier, but still gives us three women bucking the system.  The first - our heroine - is Sally Hawkins' Rita - is a machinist working in Ford's Dagenham factory. She finds empathy from her boss's trophy wife/domestic slave, Lisa (Rosamund Pike) and support from Miranda Richardson's brilliantly spiky Barbara Castle. 

The film is a very easy watch, glorying in its period costumes and kitschy interiors, and rarely showing the true  hardships of a strike. It's all rather day-glo and, worst of all words, "feel-good". Still, insofar as it does make you feel good while teaching you something about the fight for equal pay (a fight still not yet won), that can't really be a bad thing, can it? That said, one might have hoped for a movie painted in less broad strokes and with less of a simplistic moral stance.

MADE IN DAGENHAM played Toronto 2010 and opened in Norway, the UK, Finland, Israel, the USA and Italy last year. It opened earlier this year in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Singapore, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Mexico, Denmark and Turkey. It is available to rent and own.

THE WAITING ROOM - modern life is rubbish

Real life is drab. Grey skies, banal relationships, sitting on grubby trains pulling into worn out railway stations. People stay in crap relationships through inertia and the man/woman of your dreams walks by on the platform. THE WAITING ROOM is an earnest, well-acted drama that faithfully transcribes all this dreariness and the result is one of the most boring movies I have ever seen. Anne-Marie Duff and Ralf Little play two nice people who meet by chance in a railway station waiting room but don't act on their mutual attraction because they are both stuck in unfulfilling relationships. The rest of the film sees them mope around until they finally meet again and hold hands. Seriously. That's it.

THE WAITING ROOM was released in the UK last summer and is available on DVD.

DEATH AT A FUNERAL - monumentally unfunny

DEATH AT A FUNERAL is a British farce blessed with a good director (Frank Oz) and a hansome cast of British actors - from Rupert Graves to Kris Marshall to Daisy Donovan. These are people we KNOW can be funny. Frank Oz is a funny man. Kris Marshall is a funny man. Daisy Donovan had her own comedy show, for heaven's sake. And yet the resulting ninety minute film is monumentally unfunny. I mean, I was sitting in the cinema, bored and unsmiling, thinking how much of an achievement it was to make a film in which Kris Marshall and Daisy Donovan are just NOT funny. Stupendous. Miraculous, even? Certainly, something which suggests a malevolent deliberateness rather than unfortunate cack-handedness. Screen-writer needs to go and stand in the corner and think very carefully about what he's done. This is arguably the worst film I have seen in the year to date.

DEATH AT A FUNERAL was released in Belgium, Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Finland, Norway, Italy, Denmark, France, Portugal, Sweden, Singapore, Brazil, Australia, Russia, Spain and Greece earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Hungary on November 22nd.

RAG TALE - Fleet Street brutally satirised

The hosts of one of my favourite movie podcasts recently discussed their top movie satires, and included great films such as BOB ROBERTS and NASHVILLE. I want to give a small shout out to a small British movie called RAG TALE - released in festivals in 2005 and on Region 2 DVD in 2006. RAG TALE brutally satirises British tabloid journalism in the manner of The Eye on acid. It features the outstanding actor Rupert Graves as the editor of a tabloid paper called The Rag. The paper is owned by a rich and ruthless businessman played by Malcom MacDowell, who is obsessed with climbing the British social ladder by publishing sycophantic articles about the Royal Family in contravention of the editorial line of the paper. Aiding him in his quest is his young American wife, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. The movie is filled with the kind of scathing wit and putrid bilge that I had feared dead when The New Statesman and Spitting Image got the chop. I luxuriated in the back-biting, conspiring and foul-mouthed plotting that filled the ninety-odd minutes of the movie. HOWEVER, despite writing a satire to die for, writer-director Mary McGuckian has also committed visual suicide. Under her direction, the film is shot as if by a paralytic hunchback - all swerving hand-hold shots from odd angles. Worse still, it is edited to within an inch of its life - so much so that I felt nauseous watching it. FEAR NOT, dear reader, for there is a solution, much as it pains me to say it. We have to treat this movie as a radio play. You pop the DVD in the player, turn on the TV and then go into the next room and do some ironing. Hey presto! 90 minutes caustic wit and no need for a sick bag!

RAG TALE was shown at Edinburgh and the oh-so-wittily titled Raindance Film Fest 2005. It is available on Region 2 DVD.

V for VERY SILLY but still some good whistles and bangs

Reactions to V for VENDETTA seem poles apart: in general, the respected critics hated it but movie-goers are loving it. I guess I fall somewhere between the two poles. My first reaction was huge disappointment. In an Orwellian future, the UK is controlled by a fascist government, headed up a Big Brother-like Chancellor played by the marvellous British actor John Hurt.* Hugo Weaving plays "V", a terrorist who blows up Government buildings. V saves a young girl called Evey, played by Natalie Portman, (the stripper in CLOSER and Queen Amidala in Star Wars I thru III) and she eventually joins his cause. So far, so fantastically interesting. You have to love any movie that sends up an authoritarian "Chancellor", and attacks a fascist government that infringes upon our civil liberties. I never thought that a Hollywood that cannot quite bring itself to give a gay movie the Best Picture Oscar would make a movie that portrays terrorists as heroes! I'm loving the controversy and the honest exploration of the duties that fall on a citizen in the face of a repressive society.

However, the depression kicks in when you realise that the convoluted plot has more holes in it than Rab C Nesbitt's string vest. In addition, the film is populated by a bunch of high-class British character actors. Now, this is, of course, a good thing for international audiences. But for us Brits it can jar when we are expected to accept establishment boffin Stephen Fry as an instrument of sedition. He hosts the BAFTAs!

Anyways, I watched this movie again yesterday with altered expectations and realised that I had been way too harsh. If you just want a large dollop of popcorn-style trashy entertainment, you could do worse than see V. It has all the requisite whistles and bangs, as you would expect from a movie written by the guys who gave us The Matrix and the directed by the First AD on The Matrix and Star Wars II. In addition, the whole thing is wonderfully camp, and teeters on the brink of BATMAN AND ROBIN kitsch-tastic status. I can't take it remotely seriously, but then I do not think I am meant to. (Unlike Syriana, which wanted to be taken seriously but was still hillariously twee in its rendering of the Middle-East conflict.)

V for VENDETTA was shown at Berlin 2005 and is now on release in the US, UK, Germany and Austria. It hits France on April 19th 2006. *Amusing that Winston Smith has been resurrected as Big Brother. Kind of like when the People's Republic of Sheffield's David Blunkett turned up twenty years later as the most repressive Home Secretary in post-war British history.