The delicate wisdom and beauty of James Ivory’s films

This is my long overdue tribute to the great American director James Ivory, who is now 96. His films have lingered in my mind for several decades, even as I was delving into scores of other films, national cinemas and artistic traditions.

It was thanks to him that I first realised with his consummate second feature film, Shakespeare Wallah (1965), that the fallen British Raj is still in our veins. Every member of its large, multi-racial cast told an eloquent story about the impact British colonial rule and its end had on India; and what we – and they – were losing and relentlessly moving away from and towards.

It was also thanks to him that I experienced on screen the brilliance and profound insights of the classic novels by EM Forster and Henry James, and the equally superb more recent additions to this canon by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Kazuo Ishiguro. For instance, in A Room with a View (1985), Ivory vouchsafed to us not only the beauty of Florence, but much more deeply the joy of the discovery of first love. The kiss exchanged by Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in the sunlit Tuscan poppy field is an iconic cinema moment that anyone who has seen…

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