The film collaborations of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were so successful that “Merchant Ivory” became synonymous not just with the name of their production company but an entire style, if not genre, of filmmaking: Well-mounted period dramas of sophistication, taste, and erudition that come across today as light-years more refined than “Downton Abbey” or other costume dramas created in the wake of their popularity.
Stephen Soucy pays tribute to this remarkable collaboration and what made the films of Merchant Ivory so distinctive and unreplicatable in his new documentary of the same name, “Merchant Ivory,” the trailer for which IndieWire is exclusively debuting below. The documentary appeared at Doc NYC 2023 and was an official selection of the Palm Springs International Film Festival and Sarasota Film Festival earlier this year. It features commentary from Emma Thompson, Vanessa Redgrave, and others, including Ivory himself, now 96 years old, and the oldest Oscar winner ever, when he earned the Best Adapted Screenplay prize for 2017’s “Call Me By Your Name,” Luca Guadagnino’s queer love story filmed very much in the style of Merchant Ivory’s earlier classics such as “Maurice,” “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” and “A Room with a View.”
Merchant and Ivory were domestic partners as well as producing partners from the early ’60s until Merchant’s death in 2005 at the age of 68, and they infused queer themes in their movies at a time when few other mainstream producers did, certainly in the realm of costume dramas. There’s a rigor and intelligence to their work, whether adapting Henry James in “The Europeans” and “The Bostonians,” E.M. Forster in “A Room with a View” and “Howards End,” or Kazuo Ishiguro with “The Remains of the Day,” that defies PBS ideas of period work — something like “The Remains of the Day,” with its profoundly sad depiction of a butler (Anthony Hopkins) who never acts on his love for a maid (Emma Thompson). She works with him on an English estate that falls into ruin and scandal when its lord throws his lot in with the Nazis, completely defies the escapism that many look for in that type of film.
At the time of these movies’ greatest success in the ’80s and ’90s, Merchant Ivory’s films were sometimes dismissed by critics as exactly that kind of escapism, as Oscar-ready movies uncool by edgier cinephiles’ sensibilities. What Soucy’s documentary aims to do is show just how much worthier of appreciation these films really were. You’re not going to have a literal Booker prize winner, like you did with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, adapting most costume dramas the way she did for 23 films under the Merchant Ivory Productions banner (she won Adapted Screenplay Oscars for two of the most popular films she wrote for the duo, “A Room with a View” and “Howards End”).
Merchant Ivory Productions was in some ways a victim of its own success — “A Room with a View,” with its year-long run, played longer at New York City’s Paris Theatre than any other film in the theater’s history — and Soucy’s doc represents a chance to reframe the artistic success of their films beyond just their box-office and awards triumphs. When it opens at New York City’s Quad Cinema on August 30, it’ll follow a weeklong retrospective of their films starting August 23, with Ivory (who lives upstate) appearing at several screenings himself.
Watch the trailer for “Merchant Ivory” here.
