Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?
Ismail Merchant was a Muslim Indian who grew up in Mumbai. James Ivory is an American who attended the University of Oregon. These two men met in 1961 and became domestic life partners. They would stay together for 44 years until Ismail Merchant’s death in 2005.
They also formed Merchant Ivory Productions, a company whose goal was to make English language films in India with a goal of distributing internationally. With them was Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a screenwriter who would go on to win two Academy Awards.
As lush as those early Indian films are, Merchant Ivory Productions wouldn’t make a name for themselves until 1985’s A Room With A View, a romance film adapted from an E. M. Forster novel starring Helena Bonham-Carter and Julian Sands. Among the cast are an enviable wealth of British actors: Maggie Smith, Denham Elliott, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Judi Dench. It’s what people think of when you say “Merchant Ivory film”: a period piece from Edwardian England, proud British characters, and pretty manor houses.
The term “Merchant Ivory” conjures up memories of films like Howard’s End and Remains of the Day. The team would go one to hire other fantastic actors: Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Uma Thurman, Ralph Fiennes, and Colin Firth among others. They would go on to apply their signature aesthetic to stories set out side of Edwardian England: Jefferson In Paris, Surviving Picasso, Le Divorce. Typically James Ivory would handle directing duties while Ismail Merchant was the producer… though from time to time, Merchant would direct, sometimes by direct request.
I remember back in the day the criticisms about these films. About them being overheated melodrama period pieces that were basically Oscar bait. But now, knowing that Merchant and Ivory where closeted men who lived in an era where such a thing could be disastrous to your life… well, the movies do take a new meaning. A butler who can never be with his love because such a thing would be improper and yet never shake off that deep sense of longingness: it means something coming from a couple who could not admit their relationship was more than business until recently.
After Merchant passed away, Ivory would continue working. In 2017, he won the Academy’s Best Adapted Screenplay Award for Call Me By Your Name.
Today’s bonus prompt: what works take a new meaning once you’ve learned more about who created it?