2022-07-31
It sounds like a joke if I say that I didn't know Merchant Ivory made short films, but Autobiography of a Princess (1975) is a gem. In the space of an hour, its memory play of historical footage and narrative invention encompasses the mystique and critique of royal India, colonial ambivalence and nostalgia, and a kind of ghost-portrait that reaches far enough back in remembrance to have supported a feature if it wouldn't hit so much harder as a conversation instead. There's so much history under everything its characters say to one another. We can see more of it than they can and that still isn't all.
At first it looks like an exercise in fabulation, the creation of a one-time princely state of Rajasthan—now finally abolished like its real-life counterparts by the 26th Amendment to the Constitution of India—and its reconstruction in memory by two of its survivors, the daughter of its last maharaja and her father's former tutor and secretary. Each year since her father's death, she has invited the older Englishman from his retirement in Turton-on-Sea to her flat in Kensington where they observe her father's birthday with tea and sweets and reminiscences of their Indian past accompanied by the 16 mm flicker of her royal family, a dazzling jumble of sport and ceremony and celebration and prestige cleverly confected from archival footage for which the credits thank "The Former Princely States of Jodhpur, Jaipur and Bikaner." Allowing for the additional screening of a BBC program on the dispossessed ex-royals among whom the Princess must now count herself, nothing seems different about this year's get-together, except that perhaps for the first time the cracks which we sense widening between their recollections early on cannot be pasted over with compliments, reticence, or samosas, and the tensions of holding the past together in a shape never really its own snap not shatteringly but unignorably free.
Theatrically confined to the one set of the flat, cinematically intercut with the spaces of memory, Autobiography of a Princess is a virtual two-hander between the Princess and Cyril Sahib, played in beautiful complement by Madhur Jaffrey and James Mason. She is slender as the girl she still behaves like, glossily quick of comment and gesture, as negligently assured in her diamonds and emeralds and sea-green chiffon sari as if she is receiving one of her father's old retainers as a favor, rather than the reverse that we will discover she is asking of him. He looks not so much aged as crumbled in his not quite shabby suit, his cautious accommodations as easily breezed past as his ruminative interjections, and yet a double edge sharpens on the stories he tells against himself whether his hostess can feel it or not. Standing between them in all but the flesh is the Maharaja whose portrait in oils, garlanded for the occasion, dominates the room with the glamorous, vigorous magnetism of the man who inexorably shaped their lives. To his daughter, he represents all that was most gallant and exciting about her vanished world, the paragon of princely virtues who hunted tigers as fearlessly as his forebears and flew aeroplanes more boldly than his contemporaries and loved practical jokes and never failed in his duties and in unjust straits toward the end of his life was bitterly betrayed. Her hero-worship reduces her to schoolgirl slang, starrier-eyed about her father than she ever was about the husband whose wedding picture she barely admits into the panorama of her life: "Papa was . . . He was just tops." For Cyril who remembers more keenly the cruelty of the pranks, the heedlessness of the opulence, and the selfishness of the extraordinary and undeniable charm, the Maharaja cannot be so tidily romanticized. He cannot view the home movies with the uncomplicated wistfulness of the Princess, seeing in their brilliant collage something more painfully unresolved than the passing of the Raj. What became of his life in his years as the amusing favorite of the Maharaja, indulged and humiliated in addictive alternation. How little of India he understood at the time and how much of it has haunted him since, like the royal chhatri of which he used to dream at strange moments, the dry and echoing cenotaphs of eternally secluded queens. "I thought that I would never want to go home. I just wanted to be in India, be part of India . . . I don't know what happened. Why it stopped being fun." Even without mixing up his personal disillusion with the culture shock that left him stranded in "undreamed-of luxury," it's not a light thing to contemplate the book that the Princess has been cajoling him to write, a sort of salad days history of her father's reign. Having fallen far short of the scholarly promise of his youth, he has been engaged in recent years in the undemanding research of a biography of Denis Lever, a different kind of Englishman in India who made rather more of a success of it than Cyril—a modest sad smile of a hobby, perhaps, but wholly his own. Imperious as her father and as intimately dismissive, the Princess insists on the debt: "You were one of us."
Whatever the truth on either side, the film is too wise and dexterously written to settle its contest of narratives; its characters are left as open-ended as the secrets they disclose. Just as an element of self-persuasion emerges in the emphatic rose-tinting of the Princess' family stories, Cyril's distance from the scandal that ruined the Maharaja late in life suggests self-concealment as much as self-defense. "If you had loved him as he loved you," the Princess accuses, an old, old grievance aired more bluntly than ever before, "if you had cared for him, you would have stuck up for him" when a low-rent liaison in a London hotel ended in the pop of flashbulbs and pistols and sensational headlines of "the shot that shattered the throne." It's not that Cyril's objections don't ring wincingly true—that he would never have been listened to, that he was too discreditably known as a "degenerate," as the Maharaja's "creature." He confesses the abjection of his love for the Maharaja with a curious, puzzled pain, as if it was someone else who made those hysterical scenes and was wickedly mocked for them, who was taken for granted in his devotion and sincerely comforted in his grief with "such delicate personal attentions" that it almost seems ungrateful to euphemize them. Implicit in that love, though, is the very human possibility that Cyril stayed as far away from the scandal as he could simply because he didn't want to see what the man he loved had come down to. It plays like a pantomime in the Princess' mind, her matinée idol of a father besieged by scurrying little blackmailers in a silent melodrama of the badger game. How different was Cyril's reluctance to involve himself from her impulsive destruction of the newspaper clipping that details her father's disgrace? Hasn't the Maharaja become for him, too, a cipher of royal India, the contradictions of the man melded into his overwhelmed memories where weddings and births and burials all ran together in the wheel he could never accept? How would anyone begin to write that book, which could only ever be a record of their own reflection? Hence the title, if the act of curating and maintaining memory says so much more about the person behind the pen than on the page. Next year in Kensington, and how shall we tell the story then?
Autobiography of a Princess was scripted, directed, and produced by the three-headed god-monster of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, James Ivory, and Ismail Merchant and points so much forward to their arthouse breakout Heat and Dust (1983) that I am delighted to see both films available on the same Blu-Ray/DVD. It's a marvelous part for Mason, whose characters were far more often on the other side of the glamouring—when Cyril ruefully recalls his early efforts to wear the Rajput court dress in which the Maharaja liked to dress him, it's delicious to imagine the young Mason looking like an Orientalist fantasy and incredibly awkward about it. I am still catching up on Jaffrey as an actor, having known her for years as the author of some of my earliest encountered retellings of Hindu myth and epic, but she's effortlessly shaded in a role that could have been merely a willfully superficial foil. The Maharaja is represented by Nazrul Rahman, the aged court musician over whose singing Cyril takes his leave of the Princess in the chilly London sunset is Bari Moti Bhai. The cinematography of Walter Lassally shares the screen in increasing stream of consciousness with archival and contemporary materials including shots of the Umaid Bhawan Palace, the Karni Mata Temple, and a goat sacrifice to Kali. "You may laugh at me," Cyril remarks, "but sometimes at my age it's not easy to distinguish between the past and the present, the desert and the sea." At any age, they may not be so far apart. This luxury brought to you by my undreamed-of backers at Patreon.
At first it looks like an exercise in fabulation, the creation of a one-time princely state of Rajasthan—now finally abolished like its real-life counterparts by the 26th Amendment to the Constitution of India—and its reconstruction in memory by two of its survivors, the daughter of its last maharaja and her father's former tutor and secretary. Each year since her father's death, she has invited the older Englishman from his retirement in Turton-on-Sea to her flat in Kensington where they observe her father's birthday with tea and sweets and reminiscences of their Indian past accompanied by the 16 mm flicker of her royal family, a dazzling jumble of sport and ceremony and celebration and prestige cleverly confected from archival footage for which the credits thank "The Former Princely States of Jodhpur, Jaipur and Bikaner." Allowing for the additional screening of a BBC program on the dispossessed ex-royals among whom the Princess must now count herself, nothing seems different about this year's get-together, except that perhaps for the first time the cracks which we sense widening between their recollections early on cannot be pasted over with compliments, reticence, or samosas, and the tensions of holding the past together in a shape never really its own snap not shatteringly but unignorably free.
Theatrically confined to the one set of the flat, cinematically intercut with the spaces of memory, Autobiography of a Princess is a virtual two-hander between the Princess and Cyril Sahib, played in beautiful complement by Madhur Jaffrey and James Mason. She is slender as the girl she still behaves like, glossily quick of comment and gesture, as negligently assured in her diamonds and emeralds and sea-green chiffon sari as if she is receiving one of her father's old retainers as a favor, rather than the reverse that we will discover she is asking of him. He looks not so much aged as crumbled in his not quite shabby suit, his cautious accommodations as easily breezed past as his ruminative interjections, and yet a double edge sharpens on the stories he tells against himself whether his hostess can feel it or not. Standing between them in all but the flesh is the Maharaja whose portrait in oils, garlanded for the occasion, dominates the room with the glamorous, vigorous magnetism of the man who inexorably shaped their lives. To his daughter, he represents all that was most gallant and exciting about her vanished world, the paragon of princely virtues who hunted tigers as fearlessly as his forebears and flew aeroplanes more boldly than his contemporaries and loved practical jokes and never failed in his duties and in unjust straits toward the end of his life was bitterly betrayed. Her hero-worship reduces her to schoolgirl slang, starrier-eyed about her father than she ever was about the husband whose wedding picture she barely admits into the panorama of her life: "Papa was . . . He was just tops." For Cyril who remembers more keenly the cruelty of the pranks, the heedlessness of the opulence, and the selfishness of the extraordinary and undeniable charm, the Maharaja cannot be so tidily romanticized. He cannot view the home movies with the uncomplicated wistfulness of the Princess, seeing in their brilliant collage something more painfully unresolved than the passing of the Raj. What became of his life in his years as the amusing favorite of the Maharaja, indulged and humiliated in addictive alternation. How little of India he understood at the time and how much of it has haunted him since, like the royal chhatri of which he used to dream at strange moments, the dry and echoing cenotaphs of eternally secluded queens. "I thought that I would never want to go home. I just wanted to be in India, be part of India . . . I don't know what happened. Why it stopped being fun." Even without mixing up his personal disillusion with the culture shock that left him stranded in "undreamed-of luxury," it's not a light thing to contemplate the book that the Princess has been cajoling him to write, a sort of salad days history of her father's reign. Having fallen far short of the scholarly promise of his youth, he has been engaged in recent years in the undemanding research of a biography of Denis Lever, a different kind of Englishman in India who made rather more of a success of it than Cyril—a modest sad smile of a hobby, perhaps, but wholly his own. Imperious as her father and as intimately dismissive, the Princess insists on the debt: "You were one of us."
Whatever the truth on either side, the film is too wise and dexterously written to settle its contest of narratives; its characters are left as open-ended as the secrets they disclose. Just as an element of self-persuasion emerges in the emphatic rose-tinting of the Princess' family stories, Cyril's distance from the scandal that ruined the Maharaja late in life suggests self-concealment as much as self-defense. "If you had loved him as he loved you," the Princess accuses, an old, old grievance aired more bluntly than ever before, "if you had cared for him, you would have stuck up for him" when a low-rent liaison in a London hotel ended in the pop of flashbulbs and pistols and sensational headlines of "the shot that shattered the throne." It's not that Cyril's objections don't ring wincingly true—that he would never have been listened to, that he was too discreditably known as a "degenerate," as the Maharaja's "creature." He confesses the abjection of his love for the Maharaja with a curious, puzzled pain, as if it was someone else who made those hysterical scenes and was wickedly mocked for them, who was taken for granted in his devotion and sincerely comforted in his grief with "such delicate personal attentions" that it almost seems ungrateful to euphemize them. Implicit in that love, though, is the very human possibility that Cyril stayed as far away from the scandal as he could simply because he didn't want to see what the man he loved had come down to. It plays like a pantomime in the Princess' mind, her matinée idol of a father besieged by scurrying little blackmailers in a silent melodrama of the badger game. How different was Cyril's reluctance to involve himself from her impulsive destruction of the newspaper clipping that details her father's disgrace? Hasn't the Maharaja become for him, too, a cipher of royal India, the contradictions of the man melded into his overwhelmed memories where weddings and births and burials all ran together in the wheel he could never accept? How would anyone begin to write that book, which could only ever be a record of their own reflection? Hence the title, if the act of curating and maintaining memory says so much more about the person behind the pen than on the page. Next year in Kensington, and how shall we tell the story then?
Autobiography of a Princess was scripted, directed, and produced by the three-headed god-monster of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, James Ivory, and Ismail Merchant and points so much forward to their arthouse breakout Heat and Dust (1983) that I am delighted to see both films available on the same Blu-Ray/DVD. It's a marvelous part for Mason, whose characters were far more often on the other side of the glamouring—when Cyril ruefully recalls his early efforts to wear the Rajput court dress in which the Maharaja liked to dress him, it's delicious to imagine the young Mason looking like an Orientalist fantasy and incredibly awkward about it. I am still catching up on Jaffrey as an actor, having known her for years as the author of some of my earliest encountered retellings of Hindu myth and epic, but she's effortlessly shaded in a role that could have been merely a willfully superficial foil. The Maharaja is represented by Nazrul Rahman, the aged court musician over whose singing Cyril takes his leave of the Princess in the chilly London sunset is Bari Moti Bhai. The cinematography of Walter Lassally shares the screen in increasing stream of consciousness with archival and contemporary materials including shots of the Umaid Bhawan Palace, the Karni Mata Temple, and a goat sacrifice to Kali. "You may laugh at me," Cyril remarks, "but sometimes at my age it's not easy to distinguish between the past and the present, the desert and the sea." At any age, they may not be so far apart. This luxury brought to you by my undreamed-of backers at Patreon.
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