One would be justified in assuming that Merchant Ivory, the legendary production company that gifted the world with classic costume dramas like The Remains of the Day starring Anthony Hopkins and A Room with a Viewstarring Helena Bonham Carter, would hum along as a refined moviemaking machine so successful and respected that every production was a breeze. But as director Stephen Soucy explains in his informative and entertaining documentary, Merchant Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and helmer James Ivory often worked under constraints so onerous that Hopkins once sued the company for unpaid wages.
Soucy’s documentary is filled with such behind-the-scenes tea-spilling, yet it’s also quite affecting when it recounts the personal relationship between Ivory, who grew up in Oregon, and Merchant, a Mumbai-born Muslim. They were a gay couple during a fraught time for such relationships. However, despite cultural pitfalls and bouts with infidelity, they maintained an unbreakable personal bond as well as a professional association that resulted in 43 films and over two dozen Oscar nominations.
In telling the company’s story, Soucy scores new interviews with Merchant Ivory stalwarts like Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Vanessa Redgrave, and Hugh Grant. But the key interviewee is Ivory himself, still active at age 96. He makes the doc required viewing for those craving more information about a personal and professional relationship that was often just as fascinating as any Merchant Ivory film.
The Meager Beginnings of an Oscar-Nominated Duo
The penny-pinching nature of a Merchant Ivory film, especially in its early days, is what gives Soucy’s documentary much of its humor and sense of surprise. Credit (or blame) for that goes to Merchant who, according to Hugh Grant, was “not a conventional producer,” an accusation for which Soucy provides much evidence. But Ivory trusted Merchant to “always pull it together,” which he did, often in clever ways.
Merchant was known to dissuade disgruntled crew members from quitting a production by arranging exclusive, one-of-a-kind day trips. Once, when agents sent telegrams to their clients demanding they stop working on a Merchant Ivory production for lack of payment, Merchant stole the telegrams before they reached their hotel rooms so that shooting could continue. “You never went to bed without trying to dream up ways of killing him,” says Merchant’s ghostwriter Anna Kythreotis, “but you couldn’t not love him.”
Indeed, love, both onscreen and off, is the through line of Soucy’s documentary. Two of Merchant Ivory’s best films were examinations of love buried under the burden of duty (The Remains of the Day) and love denied, often under threat of imprisonment. The latter describes a particularly powerful passage from their groundbreaking 1987 same-sex romance, Maurice. The film was Merchant Ivory’s risky follow-up to A Room with a View, which had won three Oscars but wasn’t a monetary windfall for the company.
Still, Maurice was a film that Ivory insisted on making at a time when then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was complaining that children “are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” Maurice, which gave Hugh Grant’s career a major boost, is name-checked here as the “grandaddy” of gay cinema.
For Merchant and Ivory, It Was “Love at Second Sight”
There is a bit of English reserve in Ivory when he recounts the ups and downs of his 40-year personal relationship with Merchant, but we do learn that the pair met at the Indian Consulate in New York City in 1961 during a screening of Ivory’s short documentary, The Sword and the Flute. Calling their pairing “love at second sight,” Ivory says they soon added a filmmaking partnership to their personal one, decamping to India to make English-language movies for the local market.
The duo were discrete about their love. To Merchant’s conservative Muslim family, Ivory was just his “American friend,” although the perceptive crew of their first film, the 1963 Indian drama The Householder, would call the pair Jack and Jill.
The Householder was scored by composer Richard Robbins, who would write the music for 21 Merchant Ivory films and, in one of the doc’s biggest surprises, Ivory admits that Robbins had an affair with Merchant. The Householder was based on the novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the pair’s eventual key collaborator, writing 23 Merchant Ivory screenplays including the 1979 film version of novelist Henry James’s The Europeans, their first production outside India and the film that would alter the course of their career as they began producing deeply emotional and highly literate book adaptations.
Ivory Scores an Oscar for Call Me by Your Name
Soucy’s sparse and flat narration is a downside, but otherwise, he and editor Jon Hart move things along nicely, and they don’t shy away from detailing how the quality of Merchant Ivory films began to slide once American studio money entered the picture. Soucy also coaxes choice quotes from interviewees who look back fondly on the duo, including Sam Waterston (veteran of three Merchant Ivory films), who calls the pair “fascinating pirates,” and Jhabvala’s daughter who, with a sly smile, christens them “crooks and thieves.”
That, of course, is a cheeky overstatement, but Soucy’s illuminating documentary proves that Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were definitely an odd pairing; the hustling, “anything to save a buck” producer and the genteel director working to create lasting films and a lasting relationship. Ivory may be the only surviving member of the company’s principal foursome — Merchant died following abdominal surgery in 2005, while Robbins died in 2012 and Jhabvala died in 2013 — but he’s far from retired.
In 2018, Ivory became the oldest person to win an Oscar, taking home the Best Adapted Screenplay award for Call Me By Your Name. Much like Soucy’s documentary, it was a fitting and well-earned victory lap for a man whose life and art continues to push boundaries. From Cohen Media Group, Merchant Ivory opens Aug. 30 in NY and LA before a wider release in Sep. You can find theaters and showtimes here.
