Ivory, without the Merchant

The phrase “Merchant Ivory” has become so synonymous with upscale art-house filmmaking that it is easy to forget that there were two actual people behind it, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory. Together, they made more than 20 films over more than 40 years; “The City of Your Final Destination,” which opens Friday in L.A., marks the first film Ivory has shot since Merchant died in 2005. An adaptation of a novel by Peter Cameron, the screenplay for the romantic drama was written by longtime Merchant Ivory collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

“We had a common goal, which was just to make our films, whatever they happened to be,” Ivory, 81, said recently by phone from his home in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley about his remarkably long-running creative collaborations. “I think it’s just total immersion in what we were doing . . . and they cover all kinds of places and types and periods. And that gave us great strength to be this sort of independent threesome, complete unto ourselves -- director, writer and producer.”

“City” follows an ambitious academic (Omar Metwally) who at the urging of his girlfriend (Alexandra Maria Lara) shows up unannounced at the South American estate of a deceased writer. Hoping to gain the family’s permission to write an authorized biography, he meets the writer’s widow (Laura Linney), mistress ( Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother ( Anthony Hopkins) and is drawn into their world of intrigue and domestic politics.

Ivory had already begun developing “The City of Your Final Destination” before Merchant passed away, and the two had even been to Argentina to scout what would become the main locations. The film began shooting in late 2006 but eventually shut down for more than a year due to financing difficulties. The movie finally had its world premiere at the Rome International Film Festival in fall 2009.

“It was a film we were planning to make, and I still wanted to make it, so I did,” Ivory said.

Though their brand may bring to mind such British-centric heritage-minded costume dramas as “Howards End,” “The Remains of the Day” and “A Room With a View,” the Merchant Ivory filmography is actually a more diverse body of work, including “Slaves of New York,” “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” and “Le Divorce.”

“I think there’s kind of an overall similarity, in that we try to create a kind of harmony in the work,” said Ivory, a three-time Oscar nominee for best director. “I think that’s there in everything. But I didn’t realize sometimes when I was doing a particular film just how closely concerned with the material I was, how it had to do with my own life and the way I was living and my own thinking. I wasn’t really aware of that until I looked at the films years later. One is supposed to know every reason why one does something, when in fact you don’t.

“We came to the conclusion after a while that all the films together form a kind of autobiography, really, of the three of us.”

Ivory is now working (without Jhabvala) on a period adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Richard II.” The sort of tasteful, classy adult dramas that are Ivory’s trademark are just the kinds of films that were once an art-house staple and are now struggling to draw audiences. Where did his audience go, one might ask, and does Ivory think there is still room for pictures like “The City of Your Final Destination” in the fast-evolving theatrical marketplace?

“That I can’t answer,” Ivory said. “I want to see what happens with this film. Maybe they’ll come. It’s all I can hope for.”

A look at Von Trier

For fans of eccentric Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, the next week will bring some essential insights into his filmmaking process thanks to two programs at the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre.

On April 22, there will be a rare screening of the uncensored version of his 1998 film “The Idiots”; it’s on a double bill with “The Humiliated,” a documentary on the film’s making. Then, on April 25, two additional documentaries will be screened, “The Purified,” an insider’s view of the radical Dogme 95 filmmaking movement, and “The Exhibited,” a look at a Von Trier art project improbably connecting actors in Copenhagen and ants in New Mexico. All three documentaries were directed by Jesper Jargil.

“What I find most interesting about this particular group of films at this particular point in his career is it reveals a turning point where he addressed his own control issues as a filmmaker and began to make them part of the films themselves,” Hadrian Belove, head programmer at the Cinefamily, said of Von Trier.

“The Idiots,” made as part of Dogme 95, was among the earliest of the recent wave of films to explore shooting on video, and its rough-hewn visual style gives way to an unexpected emotional intensity. The film, about a cultish group that pretends to be mentally disabled, is funny, sad, confusing and shockingly odd -- in a way it prefigures “Borat,” with its purposeful slippage between fiction and reality. It is nearly topped, though, by Jargil’s look at its creation, as Von Trier gave Jargil access to audio diaries that he kept during the shoot, adding additional complicating layers to its discomforting sense of reality.

“I think he’s one of the most fascinating filmmakers today,” Belove added about Von Trier. “I think that’s why peoples’ responses to him are as extreme as they are. And his being as formally aggressive as he is, as formally ambitious, he’s a particularly unique filmmaker. He’s constantly pushing his own boundaries.”

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