Word: jhabvala
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With novelist-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 64 -- a German-born Polish Jew who escaped to England when she was 11, then lived in Delhi with her Indian architect husband for 25 years until relocating in New York City in 1976 -- Merchant and Ivory form what amounts to a nuclear family, a multinational corporation and a tight little island of quality cinema. "We're like the government of the U.S. sometimes," notes Ivory as the trio sits in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel to discuss their new film, Howards End. "I'm the President, he's Congress...
...your schmucky gob"? Does the world really need another lecherous British officer dithering, "I say, Lorna, I'm terribly keen on you"? At times, with their perfumed dissolutes and frustrated shrinks, the stories read like crude distillations of the Anglo-Indo-American vignettes of screenwriter-novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, or even like bite-size appetizers for the full-course feast of a Salman Rushdie novel...
Directed by James Ivory; Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala...
Arriving in 1961 in India, they persuaded Novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to write their scripts, and Jhabvala, 59, an English-educated German married to an Indian, has worked on almost all their pictures, Maurice being a rare exception. The team's reputation was established with their second film, Shakespeare Wallah. The story of a troupe of English actors traveling across India, the film was made on a budget of $80,000, small even by Indian standards. The modest renown established by that film was nearly lost by a subsequent series of almost perversely maladroit efforts, including The Guru, Bombay Talkie...
Muffled lives explode in such understatements. Jhabvala adopts the identities of characters from an alien culture without romanticizing or condescending. Her spare prose leaves little room for metaphor; her India emerges out of small specifics, accretions that summon up heat, hope, squalor and a vast expanse of sky. These stories do not demystify India; they pay the place tributes of empathy and grace...