I screened this documentary out of a misplaced sense of duty. After all, the filmmaking team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory made a number of exceptional films over many years’ time, and Ivory is still going strong at age 95. Attention must be paid, and good work celebrated. Stephen Soucy has done just that, but he’s given us a good deal more. Only an insider would be able to penetrate the curtain of discretion that has surrounded the filmmaking team for decades. It was known that of the two, Ivory was the hands-on director and Merchant the outgoing producer who raised the money to get movies like Shakespeare Wallah and The Bostonians made. Most of their films were scripted by the prize-winning author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—not an Indian,…
