The 1983 film “Heat and Dust,” adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her 1975 Booker Prize-winning novel, was the first big international success for the team of Jhabvala, producer Ismail Merchant, and director James Ivory — though I thought they hit their stride in the 1979 film of Henry James's novel, The Europeans. Almost all the Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala (MIJ) films focus on alienness and failure to comprehend or communicate across differences of class and/or nationality.

“Heat and Dust” preceded the masterful screen adaptations of novels by E. M. Forster (Room with a View, Howard's Ends, for both of which Jhabvala received Oscars), Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day), and Kaylie Jones (A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries), the interesting if less-assured adaptations of Henry James's The Bostonians and The Golden Bowl, and the disappointing adaptations of Diane Johnson (Le Divorce), Evan Connell (Mr. and Mrs. Bridge), and the hideous original-screenplay disaster of Nick Nolte as "Jefferson in Paris." (Jhabvala did not adapt Forster's Maurice or Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York (which I've never seen) for Merchant Ivory.

In addition to focusing on miscommunication between characters differing in status, MIJ films are noted for sumptuous period sets and costumes, conventional visual framing, fairly conventional cutting, and compelling female performances. Heat and Dust helped make that mold.

Julie Christie is excellent in an unflamboyant, unimperialistic (postimperial) role as Anne, a BBC researcher fascinated by her grandmother's sister Olivia (Greta Scacchi in her English-language debut), who disappeared into the Himalayas during the 1920s. The film intercuts between her interviewing Harry Hamilton-Paul (Nickolas Grace), a surviving friend of her great-aunt, revisiting what had been the principality of Satipur, where Olivia's husband, Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove) was stationed, and the story of Olivia in India, beginning with her disappearance from the British hospital and then flashing back to her arrival in Satipur and proceeding chronologically.

Plot spoiler ahead

The structure of two women in the same place 55 or so years apart is not extraordinarily complex, but does require the viewer following somewhat parallel trajectories. In both stories, the woman takes an interest in the local culture and people that is unseemly to the racist/imperialist tradition. Suspicion of sexual intrigue (viewed as "miscegenation") precedes sex in both stories, though eventually each heroine is bedded and impregnated by an amiable and attractive "native" (Olivia by the ruler (Shashi Kapoor), Anne by her landlord (Zakir Hussain, composer and tabla master)) and takes refuge above the heat and dust of the plains in the foothills of the Himalayas (in the same house, of course).

At the end of the movie, Anne is going to have her baby (whose paternity is not in question), whereas her great aunt had a messy abortion (with the question of paternity very open to question). That the viewer is left to guess how and where Anne will live after giving birth to a Eurasian baby seems to me to be fine, not least because she seems to have many options. In contrast, her great aunt is dead by the time Anne is revisiting her surviving friend and former haunts, and it seems to me that what happened to her in decades up near the eternal snow should at least be told, if not showed.

Olivia felt stifled as the wife of a colonial official (which seems understandable enough in a kind of gilded cage under the surveillance of Indian servants (both at her husband's compound and in the princely court) and of censorious British women who had adjusted to their "place." In her retreat, she was free of the surveillance by the latter, but was still in a kind of gilded cage. Wasn't she restive, I want to know. Also, she seemed a lot more dependent on men (her husband and her lover) than her great niece, so I wonder how she survived in isolation in a very alien environment. (Anne undertakes learning Hindi early and with apparent considerable success.)

End of plot-spoiling discussion

My disappointment with “Heat and Dust” is that it does not follow-through the story of Olivia. Apparently her letters ceased after she fled the hospital in the middle of the night (the aftermath of which is the movie's very first scene), but since Anne finds where she went, she would have sought out people who knew Olivia there, and this is not shown in the film.

The performances all-round are superb. Greta Scacchi has the most challenging role, keeping Olivia sympathetic in her combination of stubbornness, heedlessness, frustrations, and yearnings. Watching “Heat and Dust” again on DVD makes me wish she had had better roles after this auspicious start. Her talents and beauty have been mostly wasted. Julie Christie has not had many good roles since 1983, either, but at least had had some before then. Shashi Kapoor was a big star in Indian movies (and had starred in Ivory’s earlier “Shakespeare Wallah”) and continues to be one. Zakir Hussain, tours the world performing his music and Madhur Jaffrey (who played his mother and an enemy of Olivia who was invisible as such to Olivia) is currently touring the United States promoting one of her cookbooks. And MIJ is a going concern, not content to push earlier MIJ work on DVD.

Why the boomlet of films about the British Raj (in which one could include “Gandhi” just before “Heat and Dust, A Passage to India” and the miniseries “Jewel in the Crown” just after it) occurred in the early 1980s and then ceased are unclear to me. The fictional films (the last three in this list) were similar in having brutish British males and British females more open to experiencing a different culture and in showing dire consequences for the Indians and the British females stemming from intercultural contacts, but someone with a better understanding than mind of Thatcherite England will have to make sense of the mix of imperial nostalgia and guilt in these films.

The Criterion DVD

It seems almost redundant to mention that a Criterion DVD has a carefully remastered print and many “bonus” features. I have to say that I found some of the dialogue somewhat difficult to make out (and this is not due either to Altman-style overlapping dialogue or to the accents of the actors). Walter Lassaly’s cinematography looks great.

The DVD extras include a chatty and entertaining though unanalytic comment track with Ivory, Scacchi, and Grace; a discussion about the film by Merchant, Ivory, and Jhabvala (in which the most important information is that Jhabvala envisioned a seedier court in decline than the gorgeous, resplendent one invented for the film); a theatrical trailer (which is too long to have been the American one); and a 58-minute 1975 MIJ tv movie, “Autobiography of a Princess” that starred James Mason and Madhur Jaffrey.

“Autobiography of a Princess” was filmed just after Jhabvala had written the novel “Heat and Dust” and provides something of a variation on “Heat and Dust” in having an aging and apparently homosexual Englishman who had once been a part of an Indian princely court (Mason as Cyril) looking back (as Harry Hamilton-Paul does in “Heat and Dust”) to when he was a princely toy (a kept Englishmen as an adornment for the court; there is no implication of sexual involvement with either prince).

Instead of playing the scheming mother of the ruler as in “Heat and Dust”, Madhur Jaffrey plays the daughter of a deposed one in “Autobiography of a Princess”. The princess has Cyril over once a year to look at movies of what she sees as the “good old days.” (this time accompanied by a BBC news segment about Indira Gandhi amending the Indian constitution to remove the privileges retained for the princes whose principalities were swallowed up into the country of India).

Like Harry, Cyril has a less starry-eyed memory of the time being caught between the expectations of the colonial elite and the local, princely court. It becomes clear (though not to her) that the princess was not as well cared for by her father as she recalls (or imagines). Jaffrey is superb as an unreliable narrator. It takes quite a long while for Mason to do more than look wistful and defeated, but, eventually, he has a lengthy speech of considerable force.

“Autobiography of a Princess” is not very cinematic, though the set decoration (of the princess’s London apartment) conveys a good deal of information, as is typical in MIJ films. And, as one may almost take for granted in an MIJ film, the actors are very, very good.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age