Heat and Dust (1983)
Directed by James Ivory

Film Review

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screen adaptation of her Booker Prize winning novel Heat and Dust is a sumptuously crafted and darkly compelling affair, one of her grandest and more successful collaborations with the director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.  The international success of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) provoked a sudden reawakening of interest in the UK for the British Raj, and Heat and Dust was just one of several big budget period productions which benefited from this phenomenon.  Others include: David Lean's Passage to India (1984) and the hugely successful television series The Jewel in the Crown (1984).  In common with many other Merchant-Ivory films, Heat and Dust is essentially a study in identity and cultural conflict, in which the social and political constraints of a past era conspire to prevent the main protagonist(s) from finding personal fulfilment.

The film draws parallels between the experiences of two women separated in time by sixty years, a rootless British investigative journalist Anne and her great aunt Olivia.  The stories of the two women are interwoven in a way that emphasises their similarities and the stark differences in their social circumstances.  Both women are intoxicated by the mystique and beauty of India and seek to discover their true identities through a fantasised view of a country that appears to offer them a spiritual renaissance.  Whereas Olivia becomes a social outcast through her obsession, forced to exchange one kind of captivity for another, Anne is liberated by it.  The experiences of the two women provide a kind of allegory for the spiritual rebirth of India after its liberation from British rule.

Heat and Dust has all the mesmerising visual allure of any other Merchant-Ivory period production, but it has a noticeably more poetic feel than most.  Rather than simply relating a series of dramatic incidents as in a conventional melodrama, the film concerns itself with the emotional journeys of the two central protagonists as they pursue their quest for identity.  Julie Christie and Greta Scacchi are well-chosen to play the two independently minded women (Anne and Olivia respectively) who are strikingly similar in their desire to discover who they are, and yet so perfectly representative of the era to which they belong.  Christie's Anne is very much the modern woman (circa 1980), completely in control of her life and an equal for any man she may encounter.  Next to her, Scacchi's Olivia appears like a spirited bird in a cage - she flaps her wings and yearns to escape but is prevented from doing so by the starched dictates of decorum and etiquette.  Both actresses portray their characters sympathetically and in a way that compels the spectator to see them as kindred spirits (one might almost be the reincarnation of the other), although it is ultimately Scacchi's character who is the more interesting - she is as much a victim of the Raj as the oppressed Indian people for whom she feels such a strong affinity.  Heat and Dust is an intensely haunting evocation, not only of the era in which the story takes place, but also of that yearning we all have to discover who we are and where we might be going.  Of the many great films that James Ivory worked on with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, this is perhaps the most emotionally satisfying, and the most unsettling.

Film Synopsis

In 1982, a reporter named Anne travels to the town of Satipur in India to find out more about her great aunt Olivia, who caused a scandal sixty years previously.  Having come across Olivia's letters, Anne is eager to find out more about her, and by visiting the places where she stayed she hopes to make a spiritual connection with her.  She takes lodgings at the house of Inder Lal, who offers his services as a guide and lover.  It turns out that Olivia was something of a free spirit.  When her husband, Douglas Rivers, advises her to return to England to escape the worst of the Indian summer, she chooses to stay, fascinated by the country, its people and their traditions.  Her chief interest is the wealthy local prince, the Nawab, who publicly defers to the British Raj whilst secretly lending his support to brigands and anti-British rebels.  Weary of propriety and heedless of the consequences, Olivia begins a love affair with the Newab.  When she realises she is pregnant, she faces a terrible dilemma.  Uncertain who the father of her unborn child is, Olivia decides she has no choice but to have an abortion.  Sixty years later, Anne finds herself in a similar predicament...