Heat and Dust

Cohen Media, having acquired the rights to the entire Merchant Ivory catalogue, are jubilantly doing right by the films and bringing them out in beautifully restored Blu-ray editions. We've already seen the early results of this initiative with the splendid 4K restorations of "Maurice" and "Howard's End," and now Cohen follows up with an equally impressive 4K home video release of 1983's "Heat and Dust" -- an addition to the Cohen catalogue that's all the more desirable for its inclusion of "Autobiography of a Princess," a thematically linked hour-long film from 1975 (one of nine shorts that Merchant Ivory created).

The story of "Heat and Dust" is, in a few respects -- and this is noted in the course of the two-disc release's extras -- a precursor to the filmmaking duo's adaptation of EM Forster's "A Room with A View." A young English women travels to India, where she occasions scandal of the romantic kind. Only, in this case, the scandal is based on actuality -- and it has long-lasting repercussions, not all of which (arguably, hardly any of which) are negative.

Based on screenwriter (and longtime Merchant Ivory collaborator) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's own novel, the story unfolds along parallel tracks. One is set in the 1920s, and explores the attraction between the spirited, if naive, Olivia (Greta Scacchi), who has come to India with her husband, Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove). The couple are happy, but Douglas warns Olivia that the oppressive heat of the summer will be too much for her and advises that she relocate to cooler climes for a few months -- a suggestion that Olivia rejects, despite the stultifying boredom of her new life.

One bright spot for Olivia is the gaiety at the palace of the local nawab (a Muslim nobleman similar to the Hindu maharaja). the nawab is played by Shashi Kapoor, a dashing charmer who believably makes his character into a man attractive both to Olivia and to a gay young Brit named Harry Hamilton-Paul. The nawab affords Oliva a distraction, as does Harry, but when she falls in love with him the nawab reciprocates in a manner poor Harry can only dream of.

Six decades later, Olivia's great-niece Anne (Julia Christie) arrives in the same remote Indian town looking to piece together the story of her ancestor's adventures and eventual fate. Like Olivia, Anne is more available to the advances of a local man -- for Anne it's her landlord, Inder Lal (Zakir Hussain), whose wife's health has been affected by epileptic fits. Rejected as a lover -- but not as a friend -- is an American bliss ninny named Chid (Charles McCaughan), a handsome young fellow whose aggressive sexuality and erratic demeanor sometimes strays into creepiness. (Anne shares her space with him anyway.)

Though separated by more than half a century, Olivia and Anne experience similar trajectories, facing difficult romantic entanglements and pregnancy. But their destinies diverge -- in large part because the world has moved on and women are now much more free to make a broad array of choices and chart their course through life. This is not a morality tale; no one is demonized, slut-shamed, lionized, or exalted. But the film implies a fuller and less burdened life for Anne, due to the options she has available to her that Olivia did not.

The issue of Indian royalty is explored in the hour-long "Autobiography of a Princess," in which a deposed royal (Madhur Jaffrey, who also plays the nawab's mother in "Heat and Dust") -- living in England, and the friend of a British writer (James Mason) who, many years earlier, had lived at her uncles' court -- makes a case for the preservation of the stories of her family and other royals displaced by British rule and the eventual rise of democracy in her home country. As an illustration of times past she seeks to memorialize, the princess runs a reel of old home movies, edited together, that document the life of her uncle while he was still in power. Sprinkled among the home movies are contemporary interviews with real-life Indian nobles who speak ruefully about their fall from grace.

As with "Heat and Dust" and so many other of their films, "Autobiography of a Princess" was scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, directed by James Ivory, and produced by Ivory's life partner, Ismail Merchant. The short's remarkable backstory is that it is built around actual films from the court of an Indian royal, films that depict his enthusiasms for the perks of his privileged life (such as flying his own airplanes) and also depict the rituals of the region (including animal sacrifice -- be warned; a few sheep meet their ends here, and a beautiful leopard, seen in the films, is described as having been hunted own and murdered for sport).

The pairing is inspired; the two films are of different tones and genres ("Autobiography" was initially meant to be a documentary but a fictitious story was created to frame the vintage films) but they illuminate one another quite nicely.

Disc One includes "Heat and Dust" and a commentary track featuring Greta Scacchi and Nickolas Grace talking about the production and, entertainingly, their co-star Charles McCaughan, whom they describe as essentially having played himself for the part of Chid. (Scacchi declines to give details, but declares that her first meeting with McCaughan was "too obscene" to relate in detail.)

Disc Two features "Autobiography of a Princess," a very short excerpt from an interview with Merchant, Ivory, and Jhabvala which is presented as an "Introduction" to the film, a new interview with Grace and Scacci about the film, a longer version of the interview with Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala (clearly not a new feature, given that Merchant died in 2005), a newly produced conversation between Ivory and fellow filmmaker Chris Terri (who interrogates Merchant about his films and influences), and both the original and re-relase trailers for "Heat and Dust."

An accompanying booklet includes comments by James Ivory -- now 89 and still garnering acclaim, he's the screenwriter behind the critically beloved 2017 film "Call Me By our Name" -- and an essay by film writer and Merchant Ivory scholar John Pym.

"Heat and Dust" deserves its place in the Merchant Ivory canon. If it has been overlooked in recent decades, the time to correct that is now. Cohen Media has made it possible with a loving restoration and all the commentary you need to contextualize and understand both the story and the film itself in terms of place, time, and the filmmakers' ambitions for graceful, humane storytelling.

"Heat and Dust"
Blu-ray
$34.99
http://cohenmedia.net/films/heat-and-dust