The press blurb “A Cooler Climate,”It is a documentary of 75 minutes by James Ivory, a veteran writer and director. “deeply personal,”However, this is a relative term. Ivory is a remarkablely reticent man at 94 years old. Partly this is due to being born at a specific time and place. He is limited in the information he can and will share about himself, so he must be careful not to reveal too much.
The spark that ignited it “A Cooler Climate”It was a chance to show color footage that Ivory, a young man, had shot in Afghanistan in 1960. The idea of making a documentary. It was only a few years later that he made his first narrative film with Ismail Merchant as his producer. He also made a series prestigious literary adaptations of the story in the 1980s, 1990s, and screenplays by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Ivory’s literary adaptations rely on top-tier British acting talent like Maggie Smith, Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Redgrave, and especially the very melancholy yet driving and edgy musical scores from Richard Robbins. In his memoir “Solid Ivory,” Ivory mentions that Robbins was also Merchant’s lover, an alliance that does not seem to have threatened the primacy of their own relationship; if it ever did, Ivory does not say so.
Ivory’s narration is incomplete and does not cover many important points. “A Cooler Climate,” which is scored in a sprightly fashion by Alexandre Desplat that in no way evokes the lush sadness of Robbins’ music for Merchant-Ivory films. Ivory was raised in Oregon by a wealthy family. His father owned a lumber company that provided some of the timber needed for MGM movies. Ivory’s voice has an old-fashioned cultivated quality that is nearly mid-Atlantic; he pronounces the word photogenic as “photo-gee-nic.”
Ivory describes a moment in his childhood when he asked for a dollhouseAnd a group of adults laughed at him; he tells us that he didn’t want to play with dolls but wanted a way of designing sets and furnishing rooms, for furnishings were always his abiding visual passion in Merchant-Ivory pictures like “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day.”Ivory says that he felt special when adults laughed at his jokes. But some of the images on screen prove otherwise. Ivory’s young face often shows pain. His expression also shows anger and resentment. However, he does not express these emotions in his memoir.
Sections of “A Cooler Climate”The footage Ivory took of Afghanistan has no value as the world it was capturing has disappeared. We are particularly struck by footage Ivory captured of a large Buddha sculpture that had survived thousands of years in Afghanistan, but was destroyed by terrorists in 2001.
Ivory’s understanding of Afghanistan was basic then, and it still sounds somewhat basic now. The subtext, which is all but unspoken, of “A Cooler Climate”The truth is that Ivory, a young and very repressed man, went to this country partly in order to be more open about his sexuality. He felt he couldn’t do so at home in Oregon.
Ivory describes meeting two Afghan men, who quickly became friends with him and invited him back home. Ivory is left wondering if they would have sex. They didn’t, or so it would seem, but Ivory describes a mixture of desire and dread that seems to have been characteristic of him then and is also characteristic of this documentary.
“A Cooler Climate”The film abruptly ends with Merchant describing Ivory’s meeting, and Merchant looking adoringly at Ivory. This photo may be the best representation of their relationship. For fans of Ivory’s films, “A Cooler Climate”His memoir reveals more about him, but on some subjects he is as open-minded as he was in his youth.
“A Cooler Climate”The 2022 New York Film Festival will host its world premiere.