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TRIBUTE Ismail Merchant had
a nose for great stories and knew exactly how they were to be told and
sold, writes Saibal Chatterjee
If an idea caught Merchant’s fancy, he would pursue it like a creature possessed. Rarely, if ever, did he give up on a dream for want of desire. His career, which yielded some marvellously riveting movie experiences for audiences across the globe, was an unending whirl. It had him hopping from one continent to another, from hard-nosed negotiations to relatively laid-back script sessions, from studio floors to film locations. Perfectly in consonance with his buoyant approach to life and work, Merchant died, tragically prematurely, in the thick of action. He had been unwell for a while following surgery for abdominal ulcers, but that could not keep him away. There was much that was brewing at Merchant Ivory Productions (MIP), the great filmmaking company that he forged 44 years ago with American director and close friend James Ivory. The White Countess, starring Ralph Fiennes as a blind American diplomat who bonds with a Russian refugee in 1930s’ Shanghai, was in post-production. The film, directed by Ivory, is due for release later this year. But at least two of Merchant’s own directorial ventures will now never see the light of day. He was about to begin filming The Goddess with Tina Turner playing a modern-day personification of the Mother Goddess, an embodiment of Shakti. Merchant had also announced a film on the interaction between Rabindranath Tagore and the French intellectual and writer, Romain Rolland. Bengali thespian Soumitra Chatterjee had consented to play Tagore. Merchant never stopped dreaming big, but his films sold no vacuous reveries. With Ivory and scriptwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, he created a few of the most elegant and finely chiseled literary adaptations the world has ever seen: A Room with a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day, to name only a few. He discovered cinema on the streets of Bombay but carved a niche for himself in Britain, Hollywood and beyond. Indeed, nobody did as much as Merchant to put India on the world’s showbiz map. He was one of the finest ambassadors that the land of his birth could have hoped for. Merchant was special on two counts. One, he indulged in films and feasts with equal gusto. He designed his movies like delectable gastronomic spreads pretty much in the way that he rustled up sumptuous meals for his stars. And two, he had a way with people, especially those that manned funding agencies. He could charm a juicy bone off a dog’s jaws without letting the animal know. The biggest international stars often worked for him for next to nothing. His charisma and culinary skills were enough of a draw. The Merchant-Ivory partnership has a Guinness Book entry for its amazing longevity – no team in the history of independent cinema survived this long. Only death could break it. Equally long-lasting was their collaboration with the German-born Jhabvala. Born in Bombay on Christmas day in 1936, Merchant left for New York in 1958 to study for a business degree. He strayed into movies soon after acquiring an MBA, making the Oscar-nominated short film, The Creation of Woman. The Merchant-Ivory saga started with Jhabvala’s The Householder in 1963. It was the first Indian feature to be distributed worldwide by a Hollywood studio, Columbia Pictures. They followed that up with a string of successful India-themed films, Shakespearewallah, The Guru and Bombay Talkie. The company’s reputation as a purveyor of stylish, literary-minded period pieces began to emerge in the late 1970s with The Europeans, a lush Henry James adaptation, and Heat and Dust. The Bostonians, Quartet, A Room with a View, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, Jefferson in Paris, Surviving Picasso and The Golden Bowl followed. Often accused by critics of botching up literary texts by prettifying them and draining them of their energy, Merchant continued to ply his trade regardless, frequently coming up with films that are today regarded as landmarks. After playing producer to director Ivory for 30 years, Merchant made his debut as a director in the early 1990s with In Custody, based on a novel by Anita Desai. It was as good a film as any that the company had ever produced. Mystic Masseur and Cotton Mary were among the other films that Merchant directed. With his death, the
curtain has dropped on one of the most amazing success stories in the
annals of cinema. |
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Ismail
Merchant, Indian at heart but world citizen by disposition, was a man
of immense charm and tenacity. Both these attributes of his
personality imbued the nearly 50 films that he produced in a career
spanning well over four decades.