12 FEBRUARY 1983, Page 25

Arts

Enchantment

Peter Ackroyd

Heat and Dust (`15', Curzon) The film begins with pictures of its actors framed in oval, as their names appear upon the screen — a deliberately artificial opening which promptly sets the tone of a picture which depends as much upon its stylistic self-consciousness as it does upon characters or theme. Heat and Dust is informed by principles of tone and organisation, and characterised by a restraint, that are more often associated with literature than with the cinema; in fact the partnership of Ismail Merchant, pro- ducer, James Ivory, director, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, writer, has always seemed a highly 'literary' one, taking its inspiration from such chaste and discreet writers as James or Forster. It might be said that their work bears traces of a humanism which is rare in the cinema and now practically non- existent in fiction itself.

The story of the film is, in this context, an appropriate one. Anne, a young English- woman, played here by Julie Christie, has discovered a bundle of letters written from India by her grandfather's ex-wife, Olivia. Olivia had travelled to India in the Twenties with her husband, who is a civil servant, but on the plains of Satipur she went — as the Americans say — 'stir crazy'. In other words, she has an affair. She is seduced by an Indian prince, and in one heady moment goes beyond the pale. But she does so will- ingly and, although the English consider her 'as good as dead', she experiences a form of rebirth. It is the mystery of her transformation that her young relative wishes to penetrate; and, in the attempt to understand both the life she abandoned and the life she found, Anne herself follows a similar pattern. She has an affair with a young Indian, by whom she becomes preg- nant, and seems destined to remain in the hill station where the old lady died.

So much for the plot — it sounds lumpen in synopsis (all plots do) but in the telling it is not so. The film is both economical and graceful, turning the raw sugar of a poten- tially sentimental story into something as light and as pretty as candy-floss. It moves backwards and forwards, from the Twen- ties into the Eighties and then back again, conveying very well both the sadness and exhilaration which the passage of dive evokes. Old India, as it is shown here, is richly brocaded and elegantly staged — the black-and-white dress of the 'civil line' neatly juxtaposed against the silks and col- oured stuffs of the Indian natives. These scenes are so carefully staged that they linger in the memory, like an old

photograph which in the end becomes more interesting itself than the event it depicts. Contemporary India, however, is presented in a rougher and more indeterminate way — which, of course, is partly the point. The old order was a perilous one, enduring only so long as it could impose its own somewhat narrow code of behaviour. Heat and Dust, however, does not belabour the British for their doomed attempt at empire-building; for one thing, it is itself so stylised that it cannot help but present in a sympathetic manner the elaborate order which the English introduced. And although the imaginative heart of the film lies with the transgressors of those fixed codes, they are seen to be pitied as well as envied.

Heat and Dust is so carefully constructed that it is a pleasure to watch: as scene follows scene, it is rather like observing an intricate piece of machinery being slowly put through its paces. The acting, too, is as careful and restrained as the film itself. The characters move around each other with cir- cumspection, as if each one was both pro- tected and imprisoned by invisible glass; it is much easier, after all, to be injured by that which you cannot see. And if there is a hint of theatricality in some of the perfor- mances, it is a quality which Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's literate script tends to en- courage.

Her novel, upon which the film is based, was one of the first of a number of 'Anglo- Indian' novels which have won the Booker Prize. Since I was on the jury which award- ed that prize to her, I am not about to com- plain; but the vogue for such novels in England is an interesting one. On one level they are effective just as this film is effec- tive: they are established upon certain cer- tainties which seem absent elsewhere since, in their study of the confrontation between two cultures, they imply where they do not state sets of moral values which need to be defended or questioned. That is why the film might be seen as an expression of humanism.

But the popularity of such novels and the acclaim which this film has received, have another cause. Despite the apparent foreignness of the theme, it can be read as a description of Englishness which is not, in the end, derogatory. How much of English life can be adopted by another culture, and how much can be abandoned by the English themselves when they find themselves in an alien environment? India is an enchanted place, in this film, because it is one where the English can both lose and find themselves. For Olivia and Anne it is a playground for their desires, and the charming insubstantiality of Heat and Dust is established upon this central fact.

But the fascination of the film works also at a deeper level. Despite its clear-headed but friendly attitude towards the 'empire- builders', it presents as if by sleight of hand the strangeness of India itself — the 'Indian India' which exists just beyond the confines of 'British India', the India of other beliefs and other rituals, of the chicken and the sacrificial knife. This air of mystery, bor- rowed from the country itself, permeates Heat and Dust. At its heart is the horror, and the glory, of 'passing over', of miscegenation, of being changed. It is a larger theme than the apparent story, and the more powerfully rendered in a film which works by means of suggestion and understatement.