Longing and loss: our era of British cinematic elegance

It is four decades since A Room with a View’ made Merchant Ivory a household name. Sarah Sands recalls a world in which her brother Kit and her then husband Julian were central

- Sarah Sands

This evening, the Curzon Mayfair will host a gala screening of Merchant Ivory, a masterful feature documentary directed by Stephen Soucy. Both on screen and in the audience will be some of the most prominent names in British acting history, including Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson; actors who all rose to fame because of the relationship between the quiet, elegant director James Ivory and the flamboyant producer Ismail Merchant.

Bonham Carter, who anchors the documentary tracing her ascent from ingenue to national treasure, looks back with mischief and pleasure. “It all reads like a novel,” she says. And so it does. In both art and life, the duo adapted novels by authors such as E.M. Forster, Henry James, and Kazuo Ishiguro, creating works renowned for their quintessentially British qualities – luscious expressions of suppression, pain, longing, and tenderness.

Rupert Graves, who appeared in the two Merchant Ivory films I know best, A Room with a View and Maurice, tells the documentary makers that, ultimately, these films were about how you should live your life.

The film takes the form of a retrospective of James, who, wise and humorous at 96 years old, has long outlived Ismail, who passed away at the age of 68 in 2005. Their story, like their films, is a tale of both loss and triumph.

James reflects on his 40-year love affair with Ismail, which was understood but never publicly discussed – because that was simply how things were. They never spoke about their relationship with their families.

In 2018, at the age of 89, James won an Academy Award for his screenplay of Call Me By Your Name, a story of a young man’s coming-of-age gay love. James recalls that people in New York would stop him to shake his hand and tell him he had changed their lives – not because of Call Me By Your Name, but because of Maurice, a film he had made much earlier, in 1987.