Bombay Talkie

There is nothing in this Merchant-Ivory production to indicate the sophistication of their later films. The plot, about the ill-fated romance between an English novelist Lucia Lane (Jennifer Kendal) and a Bollywood heartthrob, Vikram (Shashi Kapoor, Kendal's real-life husband), is the stuff of cheap melodrama but despite a promising opening section built around a dance routine on a giant typewriter, director James Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala don’t take it in this direction but rather deliver a lacklustre, rambling Jules And Jim-like story with the third character being an artistically-frustrated screenwriter (Zia Mohyeddin). We follow the story as Lucia and Vikram's affair runs hot and cold, Vikram abusing his dutiful wife, Lucia taking herself off to an ashram (a strategy recycled from Merchant-Ivory's first film, The Householder, 1963), before a florid denouement.

The cast, particularly, Jennifer Kendal, a member of the Kendal family who had been the subject of Merchant-Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah (1965) can do nothing with the self-conscious script, their woodenness compounded by the post-production dubbing. Whereas in his work on the earlier Merchant Ivory films Subrata Mitra's black and white photography redressed the film’s shortcomings with a visual elegance, the use of colour here only serves to emphasize this production’s failure to realize its potential. On the other hand, the film’s carefully composed opening titles hold a promise of kitsch excess that is not delivered on,

DVD Extras: New hi-def digital transfer, Conversation with the Filmmakers featurette;  a 1973 short film, Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls, about the leading dancer in Bollywood films at the time; Insert essays on both films; with English captions for the hearing-impaired

Available from: Shock Entertainment

 

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