A return to the sources of a filmography that revolutionized costume and period films, giving it sensuality and a taste for the forbidden. At 95, cult director James Ivory returns in a documentary, An Afghan Summer, in theaters Wednesday in France, on the origins of his vocation.
Long before his successes in the 1990s with Anthony Hopkins (The Remains of the Day and Return to Howards End), and even before Room with a View in 1986 with Daniel Day-Lewis, James Ivory took his first steps as a student, directing films on art, in Venice and in Asia.
In 1960, “I was shooting a film in India and it was getting hotter and hotter,” explains the director, who left his mark on cinema with his passion for India and his social satires, in an interview with AFP. his very literary and stylized adaptations of Anglo-Saxon novels. “I couldn’t last another minute. “I was advised to go to a cooler region, so I went to Afghanistan.” “I didn’t know anything about it, but I went there,” he adds.
Decades later, his images from Kabul are brought together in this documentary which shows a vanished Afghanistan, at peace far from suspecting the years of chaos and war that await it before falling under the influence of the Taliban. The images “were immediately incredible, very poetic and mysterious,” says Giles Gardner, a longtime collaborator who helped gather the rushes for the film by diving into the filmmaker’s archives. “With everything we know about Afghanistan, the violence we see in the news, the idea that it can be a place of beauty has been erased,” he adds.
An Afghan Summer sounds like the prelude to the career of James Ivory, who met Indian-born producer Ismael Merchant just after his return from Afghanistan. Partners in cinema and in life, until the latter’s death in 2005, they made more than 40 films together.
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Their intimate relationship was never made public during the lifetime of Ismael Merchant, who came from a very conservative family. Ivory, for his part, did not experience these difficulties and he confides that there were no real problems growing up, as a homosexual, in an industrial town in Oregon “I don’t understand why people think I was trying to escape something, I was a happy young man,” he emphasizes.
His meeting with Ismael Merchant was the “greatest luck” of his career, because it allowed him not to think about money matters. “Having to constantly find funds discourages so many directors, it kills their spirit. Thanks to Ismael, that never happened to me,” he says. “If he wanted to do something, he achieved it. God only knows how. Probably thanks to iron determination and his mind.
The oldest artist to have received an Oscar, at 89 years old in 2018 for the script of the initiatory romance Call me by your name, which revealed Timothée Chalamet, he says he has few regrets, except sadness of having lost his loved ones, Ismael Merchant and their writing accomplice, the British novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. “Every day I wish they were here. I love them. I’m an old man now. I have close friends, but I miss them a lot.
