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Merchant Ivory solidifies its position as father of independent film
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal
LOS ANGELES - Ismail Merchant was brash and charming as he took this reporter's call at his New York office. The Merchant Ivory producer was eager to promote his latest film, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries," in which a girl comes of age while living with expatriate parents in Paris in the 1960s and '70s.
The movie, starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey, is based on Kaylie Jones' semi-autobiographical novel about life with her father, author James Jones. Like many Merchant Ivory films, "Soldier's Daughter" explores the conflict of cultures and the pressures experienced by protagonists living in exile. The preoccupation makes sense when you consider the diverse backgrounds of the artists who run the company.
Director James Ivory, a Catholic from a wealthy Oregon lumber family, made his first films in Italy and India. Producer Merchant, a Muslim whose father headed the Bombay branch of the Muslim League, moved to New York at age 22 to get into show business. Screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a Jew and Holocaust refugee, settled with her Parsee husband for a time in New Delhi.
Today, the filmmakers live in the same Manhattan apartment building and share a sprawling manor house in Claverack, N.Y.
"We observe each others' holidays and traditions," says Merchant, who fasts on Yom Kippur and joins Jhabvala for matzo ball soup.
The story of Merchant Ivory begins with Ismail Merchant, whose panache for extracting funds from reluctant backers on several continents has made the company a pioneer of independent film.
The producer traces his powers of persuasion to his childhood, when, as the pampered only son of a textile merchant, his parents and six sisters doted on him.
In New York in 1961, he met the professorial Ivory at a screening of Ivory's documentary about Indian miniature painting. Over coffee, he persuaded the novice director that they could do great things together. Before long, the two men were off to India to convince shy, reserved Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to sell the movie rights of her novel, "The Householder."
Merchant says he was fascinated by Jhabvala's background, having learned the details of the Shoah only the previous year. "I saw the Swedish documentary, 'Mein Kampf' in San Francisco in 1960," he says. "Afterwards, I was horrified and full of anguish. I had learned the extent of what humans can do to each other."
The producer points out that although he has directed only four films for Merchant Ivory, one has a Holocaust theme. "The Proprietor" (1996), starring Jeanne Moreau, tells of the daughter of a Holocaust victim who travels to Paris to reclaim her mother's pre-war apartment.
Jhabvala did not write the film, Merchant says. In fact, she was so traumatized by the Nazis that she rarely spoke of the past.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne, Germany in 1927, the daughter of a Jewish solicitor from Poland and the granddaughter of the cantor of the largest synagogue in Cologne. She began writing stories and poems, she has said, as soon as she learned the alphabet.
When the Holocaust began, her immediate family managed to escape to England, where 12-year-old Ruth quickly learned English, continued to write fiction and read voraciously in her adopted language.
At the end of the war, Jhabvala learned that all her father's relatives - more than 40 people - had died in the concentration camps. Her father, Marcus, was so despondent that he committed suicide in 1948. Several months later, Ruth met the Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala; in 1951, they married and moved to New Delhi.
Jhabvala ecstatically began writing about India, but her novels turned darker as she gradually became disillusioned with "the tide of poverty, disease and squalor." After her three daughters were grown, she told her husband she could no longer live in India. The couple began an intercontinental marriage; Ruth made her primary home a flat a floor above Merchant's and Ivory's on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The three artists often begin their day with breakfast at Jhabvala's, where they discuss the films at hand. Typically, the director and screenwriter must ask Merchant to "green-light" a project. Jhabvala then retreats to write the script. Ivory reads the screenplay, scribbling comments all over it in red pencil.
Merchant, meanwhile, travels the world to obtain funding and persuade movie stars to work for a fraction of their usual fee.
Merchant describes his relationship with Ivory and Jhabvala as sangam, which in Hindi means the sacred meeting of three rivers.
Naomi Pfefferman is entertainment editor at the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
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