Alex Deleon
For a certain niche group of cinephiles ever since the release of a film called "Shakespeare Wallah" in 1965, the "Merchant-Ivory" label has become synonymous with high-class rarified taste in cinema in some way associated with India ("A Passage to India", "Heat and Dust"), or, in the later collaborations of this producer-director team, with ultra refined literary adaptations set in Victorian England such as "The Remains of the Day", and "Howard's end". To be brutally frank, since "Merchant-Ivory" productions were never exactly my cup of tea cinematically speaking, (although I made valiant efforts to sit through a number of their films), I never paid enough attention to discern who did exactly what, whether they were both Indian or half-Indian or what -- and merely assumed that they were in some sense co-directors something like their polar opposites, the Coen brothers in the frozen wastes of Minnesota.From a fascinating 1994 documentary screened here entitled "In Ismail's Custody" by Englishman Derrick Santini, which is basically a biopic about Mr. Merchant, and a takeoff on the name of the one film Merchant directed solo, IN CUSTODY, much of this cloudiness was cleared up. Ivory was a gay American Anglophile based in England and Merchant was an authentic Indian from Bombay. In general Ivory Directed their films and Merchant was the producer. However, "In Custody", is the one and only M&I production where Merchant for once took over the reins actually directing himself and is, for my money at least, the best picture in the entire M&I repertory.The subject of the film, based on the novel my Anita Desai, is the decline of the Urdu language in India after partition when Urdu became the official language of Pakistan but, as the idiom of the Indian Muslims, began to be looked upon with a baleful eye in India proper.For the record the plot of "In Custody runs like this: A literary editor asks Deven (Om Puri), a teacher who loves Urdu poetry, to interview a famous Urdu poet, Nur Shahjehanabadi, (Shashi Kapoor) an aging, fumbling,alcoholic, whale of a man not far from death's door. Deven goes to Bhopal from Mirpur to meet the cantankerous Nur, of whom he is in absolute awe. He finds him living with two feuding wives, and constantly visited by sycophants who drink his whisky and eat his food. Deven desperately wants to record Nur for posterity and manages to scrape up the funds to buy an aged tape recorder, to bribe Safiya, the elder wife, to get Nur into a room at a brothel for a week for the recording, and to feed Nur's pals who, whenever they show up, disrupt the recording sessions with their drunken carousing. Moreover, Deven's young technical assistant is an irresponsible deadbeat who feels he is being overworked for a pointless project and keeps messing up the tapes or failing to turn the machine on when the drunken poet finally gets around to reciting from his works. Meanwhile Nur's beautiful second wife, Imtiaz (Shabana Azmi), wants to be taken seriously as a poetess herself, but Dever dismisses her offhandedly while ignoring his own wife and child much as Nur does. In the end, hardly any of the precious recitations by Nur have been preserved as he drinks himself into the grave. In the course of the film, however, much of the melodious Urdu verses recited by Kapoor are actually heard in this boisterous requiem for a dying language. The three principals, Om with his heavily pitted but oh so soulful face, Kapoor with his massive extroverted personality, and Azmi, with her striking beauty, are all memorable as are the numerous supporting actors, particularly a very withered old woman in white whose occasional appearances punctuate the proceedings. Since Urdu was Bombay born Merchant's native language it is clear that he had a special feeling for the subject matter at hand and therefore wanted to do this picture himself. The result is a remarkably moving film which makes one wonder why he didn't do more directing. In fact, based on this one directorial effort I could not escape the feeling that some of the Ivory directed sleeperoos might have been a lot more lively if Jim and Ismail had just switched roles every now and then.Alex, River to River Indian Film Festival, Florence: Dec. 17, 2005
monsoondreamer
In Custody is Ismail Merchant's beautiful retelling of Anita Desai's novel about the death of a language and a culture as reflected in the decline of one individual. Om Puri and Shashi Kapoor play men watching, with varying degrees of remorse and resignation, the death of the Urdu language, a language of poetry, erudition and courtliness. Shabana Azmi, as Nur's (Kapoor) second wife, a courtesan and singer of ghazals, is a bridge between what is passing and the rash future. Their performances are sensitive and subtle and quietly heartbreaking. The cinematography is exquisite, making the film visually rich and haunting. There are many strong performances, and the secondary characters are well-cast. The film is more theme-driven than plot-driven, so probably not suited to every taste. One of my very favorite Ivory-Merchant offerings.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
An extremely good Indian film adapted from Anita Desai's book. It shows how India is a real laboratory for multiculturalism and at the same time it reveals a case where one culture is more or less dying in India itself because it is a minority culture based on a minority language language. Luckily it is the official language of Pakistan and this Urdu poetry is praised and appreciated in quite a few foreign countries. The film shows quite well how this old poetry finds it difficult to survive in the modern world of technology and metropolitan living. It has to be collected and saved for future generations and yet it is eroding fast. Parodies are common and the main noble themes are giving way to trite images and situations. The film though does not show the confrontation of the Hindu and Urdu cultures. It reduces the Urdu side of things to essentially the Moslem religion and it more or less entirely erases the Hindu religion. Then the discourse is no longer a discourse of exchange and sharing but rather a discourse of tolerance for the minority culture that has to come from a dominant, but neutral point of view. That's a shame in a way because the subject of the book was a lot wider and it concerned the whole world in many ways, the necessary moving away from the laicism some states preach against any religion and the indispensable adoption of a more tolerant, open and absolutely free approach of all philosophical or religious beliefs that must be granted the right to express themselves anywhere in society. Just like a man has the right to wear his color everywhere in society, a man must have the right to wear and express his beliefs everywhere in society. All dress codes and neutral-looking regulations are nothing but severe censorship if not discrimination. Yet this film is essential because it reveals a problem that is probably the most important problem to solve in the world in the coming decades: beyond tolerance how can we build a world of complete collaboration among all the different visions of the universe and life.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
