With his recent, richly earned Oscar win for Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name at almost 90, director James Ivory is back in the public imagination. So it's fitting that Cohen Media Group has reissued for the first time on Blu-ray DVD one of his crowning achievements, Heat and Dust, released in 1983. Heat and Dust was a major component of that creative 1982-84 period when there were several films and television series focusing on the British Raj, colonial rule of India, including Gandhi (1982), A Passage to India (1984) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984). Due to distribution problems it didn't do well in the U.S., but H&D was a huge hit in Europe, becoming Merchant Ivory's first big commercial success, and laying the groundwork for their future masterpieces A Room with a View and Howard's End: opulent period pieces, top-notch acting, literate screenplays, and master technicians behind the camera with meticulous attention to detail. The Merchant Ivory brand (which included Indian-born producer Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, their screenwriter, who here adapted her Booker-winning novel) as we remember them today really began with H&D, though they had been making films for 20 years. H&D would be the culmination of all their Indian-themed movies.
Its plot is composed of two intertwining stories, the first set during the 1920s, about a scandalous affair between the lovely Olivia Rivers (Greta Scacchi), the recently married wife of the handsome, dull Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove), a British civil servant sent to Satipur (Central India); and the Indian prince Nawab (Shashi Kapoor). This melodrama alternates with a 1982 saga concerning Anne (Julie Christie), Olivia's great-niece, having inherited her letters and diaries, traveling to India, following in her great-aunt's footsteps, trying to ascertain what happened to her after she aborted Nawab's baby. Anne also has an affair with her married landlord Inder Lal (Zakir Hussain, the musician) and gets pregnant. Anne had interviewed in England the elderly gay Harry Hamilton-Paul (Nickolas Grace), who lived in the Nawab's palace as a kind of court jester and confidante, but was also a close friend of Olivia's.
The Nawab is a charming, charismatic, but corrupt rogue, masterminding a group of marauding bandits. He invites all the British officials and their wives to a sumptuous dinner party where he meets Olivia, a free spirit fascinated by Indian culture and already tired of rigid British conformity and racist attitudes towards their colonial underlings. This is exemplified by Dr. Saunders and his wife, who see all Indians as children, and the men as potential rapists. Douglas tries to convince Olivia to head north during the summer with the other British wives (whom she finds insufferable) to escape the brutal heat, but she insists on remaining with him, retorting, "You have these set notions about what Englishwomen are supposed to stand. Why should anyone tell me what I can stand and what I can't stand?" This kind of female independent thinking was radical for the time, and her liaison with the Nawab is as much a revolt against British stuffiness and prejudice as it is a sexual tryst. Anne, representing the modern woman, has more choices than Olivia, and decides to keep her baby, fleeing to the same secluded house in the snowy mountains of Kashmir built by the Nawab where Olivia spent her remaining years.
Typical of many Merchant Ivory pictures, the plot is subordinate to the exotic locale and sophisticated atmosphere. On the surface there doesn't seem much going on, but underneath there's a cauldron of repressed desires and emotions. The film also mildly satirizes Westerners who use foreign countries as fodder for their own self-actualization. Despite the 60-year gap, Heat and Dust implies that not much has changed for women, with their aspirations and sexuality still ruled by men, rendered social outcasts for their self-reliance. There is a gorgeous shot uniting the generations, with Anne looking into Olivia's house as both she and the Nawab stare out at her. Perhaps because Olivia's story is more compelling than Anne's, Greta Scacchi steals the movie, at 22, her first big starring role, and as she admits in an interview, the best performance of her career. It was also the summit for Shashi Kapoor, a regular performer for Merchant Ivory and an established Bollywood star.
The main supplement is the 1975 hour-long Merchant Ivory English television film Autobiography of a Princess, also about the Raj, but in retrospect. A divorced Indian princess (Madhur Jeffrey, magnificent), living in a self-imposed exile in London, invites her Maharaja father's ex-tutor and secretary, Cyril Sahib (James Mason), to tea on the anniversary day of her late father's birthday to reminisce about royal India. Using archival 35mm footage from grand events (funerals, weddings, hunts) in Jodhpur discovered by a friend of Merchant, they form a mini-documentary of royal India, disguised as home movies of the Princess' father. Cyril, who is gay and a similar figure to Harry Hamilton-Paul, has darker memories than the Princess of her father's excesses and later arrest for corruption. Ivory filmed former real-life royalty who were upset about their cut-off allowances and privileges. Mason is extraordinary, with Ivory later commenting it was the best male performance in any of his films, with the exception of Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day. Similarity of theme and content makes it a natural companion to Heat and Dust. Because no studio would make a Merchant Ivory-type film today, we can treasure them for the jewels in the independent-film crown they truly are.