Good Housekeeping: “The Remains of the Day”

The lineage of The Remains of the Day is unusual. It began as a 1989 novel by Kazuo Ishigoro, a native Japanese who was raised in England. Though Ishigoro’s first two novels deal with the nation he had left at age 5, The Remains of the Day marked his turn toward strictly British subject matter. Following the massive success of this novel, he has explored science-fiction material (Never Let Me Go), dabbled in screenwriting (for the Oscar-nominated Living) and won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, among other major honors.

 The screen version of The Remains of the Day, released in 1993, started out (to my surprise) as a Mike Nichols project with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. When the film passed into the hands of the Merchant-Ivory team, Pinter severed ties, though apparently some of his work was used, while Nichols stayed involved as a producer. The resulting film benefits from Ismail Merchant’s, James Ivory’s and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s comfort with literary adaptations, as well as their impressive visual sense. A film about a head butler and a housekeeper numbering their days in service to Lord Darlington requires a functioning manor house as its setting. The Merchant-Ivory reputation was such (after the artistic success of films like A Room with a View and Howard’s End)  that the filmmakers were able to persuade previously reluctant property owners to open their doors to cast and crew. Clearly, the resulting film is a triumph of logistics. Several country homes were used in combination, including Dyrham Park for the house’s exterior and driveway; Powderham Castle for some gracious public rooms and a spectacular turquoise stairway; Badminton House for servants’ quarters and a conservatory. On screen it all looks like one impressive stately mansion.

 Though Ishigoro wrote his novel in the first person, from the perspective of a starchy and deeply traditional butler, the screenplay’s basically third-person point of view hardly detracts. In Anthony Hopkins’ performance we well understand how much Mr. Stevens is bound by his own past, as well as by an unrelenting sense of duty to those he sees as his betters. Playing opposite him is the always convincing Emma Thompson, as a housekeeper who would like to be braver than she is. These two would make for a natural pairing, except that their basic timidity holds them back. This is best acknowledged in what the filmmakers call “the book scene,” in which Miss Kenyon briefly sets aside her usual decorum to playfully wrestle away from Stevens the mysterious book he is reading in his rare off-hours. The fact that he rebuffs her, for no very good reason, is a wonderful indicator of his habitual strait-laced outlook (is he deeply repressed, or just shy?).

 I first saw this film when it was in theatres, and best remembered it for that very English sense of stiff-upper-lip self-denial. What I’d forgotten completely is how much the film has to say about the politics of the pre-World War II era. Lord Darlington, it appears, has a sentimental affection for German culture. Though at base he’s a well-meaning man, his money and social position help him prop up the reputation of the Nazi party within his own country. What’s deeply disturbing is that Stevens, as his loyal retainer, will not permit himself to think independently of the master of the house, even when the lives of others (like two Jewish immigrant girls in his kitchen) are at stake. So he loses not only a chance at love but also, ultimately, his self-respect. A sad ending for one who puts duty before all else.

 

Julian Sands Tragically Sought a Hike with a View

Last January, L.A. radio stations announced that English actor Julian Sands had gone missing. A seasoned hiker, the sixty-five-year-old Sands had set out for a solo excursion near Mt. Baldy, the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains. In a year marked by massive amounts of snow in Southern California, the search for Sands was repeatedly delayed. But eventually scores of volunteers hit the trail, looking for any trace of the missing actor. It was not until June that his remains were discovered and identified.

 The sad news of Sands’ demise led me to return to his breakthrough role, as handsome young George Emerson in 1985’s A Room with a View. This screen adaptation of a work by E.M. Forster set the standard for the cinematic transformations of major novels, through the collaboration of James Ivory (director), Ismail Merchant (producer), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer). This longstanding team, specializing in sumptuous, intelligent costume dramas, was once a powerful force in the movie industry, particularly in the last two decades of the 20^th century. As Merchant put it, “It is a strange marriage we have at Merchant Ivory . . . I am an Indian Muslim, Ruth is a German Jew, and Jim is a Protestant American. Someone once described us as a three-headed god. Maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster!”

 A Room with a View captures  the elegant yet repressive mores of Edwardian England, circa 1908. Its opening scenes are set in Florence, Italy, where a group of well-endowed  English travelers gather over dinner at a local pensione. The youngest of them, newcomer Lucy Honeychurch (Helen Bonham Carter), laments that her room lacks the promised view of the River Arno. Whimsical Mr. Emerson (Denholm Elliott) volunteers that he and his son will gladly swap rooms, but Lucy’s stuffy guardian, cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith), is reluctant to do anything unseemly.

 Throughout the film, Lucy is torn between the wish to obey social norms and a youthful eagerness to experience life in the raw. Her chance to elude her chaperone’s supervision comes when she visits the basilica of Santa Croce, only to find herself steps away from a violent stabbing. She faints, but is rescued by Mr. Emerson’s strapping blond son (Sands), a young man nearly bursting with a strongly romantic temperament. From this point forward, George Emerson finds moments to express his ardor for Lucy. This upends her Florentine sojourn: Charlotte whisks her back to her family’s country estate, where she tries hard to resume the life of a demure young English lady.

 Quickly there’s an engagement to Cecil Vyse, a supercilious English intellectual (Daniel Day-Lewis), who looks with disdain on anything that might smack of impropriety. (He haughtily scorns a delightful scene of Lucy’s brother and others cavorting in the buff in a neighborhood pond.) But inevitably Lucy will discover the need to rethink her choice of a husband. The film’s ecstatically happy ending provides love, rapturous kisses, and of course a room with a view.

 Sands’ character is presented on-screen as something of a conundrum, even to his loving father. Saved by family wealth from the need to choose a profession, he seems to live to revel in beauty in all its forms. His lust for life is distinctive, especially when he’s placed among his more prosaic countrymen. Obviously, a man is more than the sum of the characters he plays on screen. Still, it’s easy to imagine George Emerson’s life being suddenly snuffed out on a solo hike into the wilderness. I hope that Sands enjoyed a wonderful view before he died.

 

 

 

 

 

Making a Ruckus for “Shakespeare Wallah”

What could the word “Wallah” possibly mean? I was once told it’s the kind of nonsense syllable that background extras use to suggest general crowd noise on stage or in a film. It’s also a Hindi suffix implying someone who performs a particular task: thus a chaiwallah might be a young man who serves tea. Both senses of the word seem apt for the 1965 film Shakespeare Wallah, the story of an acting troupe, led by a family of English expats, who tour the sub-continent, bringing Shakespearean productions to Indian audiences.

 Shakespeare Wallah is an early film of the celebrated duo Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, in collaborator with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Given Merchant’s roots in Indian culture, the team had wanted to explore a touring troupe of Indian performers, seen against the recent political and social changes within the country.. But the discovery of an unpublished diary by an English actor, Geoffrey Kendal, took them in a slightly different direction. Kendal and his family, including wife Laura Liddell and two daughters, had devoted their lives to touring India with the plays of Shakespeare. Ultimately, the Kendals played versions of themselves in Shakespeare Wallah, though the film hardly reflects their precise circumstances. The film’s accent is on the family’s struggles to continue promoting their art in a newly independent country where Shakespeare is less revered than team sports and Bollywood.

 Making her film debut is nineteen-year-old Felicity Kendal, playing a version of her older sister. (Kendal has since had a distinguished acting career, including a personal and professional relationship with playwright Tom Stoppard.) In Shakespeare Wallah she is Lizzie, the troupe ingenue, sensitively portraying Ophelia and Juliet. But her love of the stage is shaken by an unexpected romance with an Indian playboy, portrayed by handsome Shashi Kapoor (in real life her sister Jennifer’s longtime husband).

 Unfortunately for Lizzie, Kapoor’s character already has a mistress, the Bollywood prima donna Manjula (Merchant-Ivory favorite Madhur Jaffrey). Hers is the role that made the biggest impact on early audiences, leading her to collect the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival. Manjula is a monster, though a wholly entertaining one. Loving public attention, she makes a stir wherever she goes. She’s introduced in an amusing scene wherein she’s filming a Bollywood-style musical number, full of stylized pouts and gestures that couldn’t be more distinct from the classical technique of the Shakespearean troupe. When she’s persuaded to watch the English thespians perform Othello, she makes the moment all about herself, signing autographs and posing for photos in the middle of the climactic scene of Desdemona’s murder. Then, while Othello is still bemoaning his lost love, she makes her exit, only to be swarmed by fans in the theatre lobby. It’s a key indication of how the arts scene is evolving in mid-century India: veneration for English tradition is quickly going out the window.

 It’s a shame that the film’s budget was only $80,000, not nearly enough to film in color. India is a land of vivid visuals, and the monochrome palette doesn’t do it justice. Ivory has admitted, “If we had made the film in color, the love scenes in the mist would have looked very strange, as some shots were done with smoke bombs given to us by the Army, which make a bright yellow smoke.” One technical detail fascinates me: the film’s eclectic score was created by none other than Satyajit Ray, the Bengali director of such masterpieces as 1955’s Pather Panchali and the rest of his Apu Trilogy. It doesn’t get much better than that.