Word: prawer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...introduction to this selection of 15 stories from four earlier books, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala notes the problem that faces all foreigners who settle on the subcontinent: "To live in India and be at peace, one must to a very considerable extent become Indian and adopt Indian attitudes, habits, beliefs, assume if possible an Indian personality. But how is this possible? And even if it were possible--without cheating oneself--would it be desirable? Should one want to try to become something other than what...
...will ever be tempted to employ terms like that to describe The Bostonians, for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it. There is a certain undiminishable power in the struggle between Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve), all snaky masculine guile, and Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave), representing feminism at its most sternly ideological, for the innocent soul of Verena Tarrant. But Ivory's camera behaves like a tourist trapped meekly behind a velvet rope at a historical reconstruction, and most of his actors seem afraid they might damage...
...Vineyard, it is so consistently picturesque you almost expect to see Whistler's name in the credits. The main problem with Ivory's Europeans were the Europeans themselves, who were about as scandalous as an invasion of nannies. The Bostonians, thankfully, sheds the genteel anemia of its precursor. Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay, and the memorable cast--Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Reeve, Linda Hunt and Madeleine Potter--are responsible for the success...
...Prawer Jhabvala's adaptation of her novel rings true throughout the film. Before they can understand the society they have chosen to enter. Anne and Olivia must learn to live with the tedious Indian climate and landscape. As an Englishwoman who married an Indian, Jhabvala understands better than anyone the difficulty of living between cultures, neither Indian nor fully British. She endows the relationships between Anne and Olivia and their Indian lovers with a passion and tension which could only derive from common experience...