Nearly forty years after its premiere at the famed cinema, Merchant-Ivory auteur James Ivory returns to his cherished romantic drama Maurice at The Paris Theater NYC.
“Perhaps we woke up each other,” are the words Maurice Hall (James Wilby) spoke to his beloved Clive (Hugh Grant) as they lie together in a downy English meadow, starry-eyed truants from their staid, restrictive Cambridge world. The remark signifies an overarching mood felt throughout New York’s famed Paris Theater by cinephiles and auteurs alike at the cinema’s screening of Merchant-Ivory’s cherished gay romance Maurice, nearly forty years after the film premiered at the very same theater in 1987. On the aesthetic surface, the film is a prim costume drama, representative of the Merchant-Ivory ilk that filmgoers expect from the famed duo’s pictures. However, it moonlights as an affecting exploration of finding your happy ending — and yourself — as a queer person against a backdrop of rigid, unforgiving societal expectations. The screening and Q&A’s warmth and communal introspection affirmed how, in the four decades since its debut, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s film has nestled into viewers’ hearts, holding a mirror to their personal experiences and a beacon of promise in uncertain times.
Reflecting on the shared dilemma between the main characters in Maurice and its predecessor, 1985’s acclaimed A Room with a View, director James Ivory notes how each centers on “[…] romantic young people who were ready to live a lie rather than follow their hearts.” The thwarted lovers at the film’s center take different avenues: Clive marries a respectable society woman, while Maurice consults a hypnotherapist and the family doctor to cure his condition, being “an unspeakable. The Oscar Wilde sort.” Each path draws them closer to what Edwardian England expects of them as gentlemen but farther from each other and their true selves. It begs the question of the greater sin: to live as an unspeakable, maligned on the outskirts of polite society, or to deny a chance at authentic happiness?
E.M. Forster, the source novelist and a closeted gay man himself, experiments with both outcomes; each young man achieves their desired endgames for better or worse: Clive remains respectably concealed while Maurice considers tossing all caution to the wind for the love of the charming rough trade Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves). “It couldn’t be published during [Forster’s] lifetime because it had a happy ending,” Ivory muses to audience laughter. “If it had a happy ending, it would’ve been considered pornography.”
“In a way, the film mirrors my own experience as someone who came of age as a gay man in the 1970s and struggled with having expectations of love. Even today, forty years later, I watch it and get liberated by the film. It is both a true film and a fairytale.”
Ira Sachs
Ira Sachs, the acclaimed independent filmmaker serving as the Q&A moderator, remarks that every scene is shrouded in protective secrecy until the ‘liberated’ conclusion and poses that perhaps “[…] the film provides a fantasy for an audience at a time in which maybe they needed it because of what was going on in 1987.” While Ivory demurs from speculating on how the film may have provided a needed cinematic refuge at the ravaging height of the AIDS crisis, Sachs further expounds upon its impact on his own coming-of-age: “In a way, the film mirrors my own experience as someone who came of age as a gay man in the 1970s and struggled with having expectations of love. Even today, forty years later, I watch it and get liberated by the film. It is both a true film and a fairytale.”
The back-and-forth between James Ivory and Ira Sachs is a brief master class, allowing the audience to witness two great auteurs exploring the medium on which they built their lives and professional names. Revisiting the experience of making Maurice, Ivory presents a freshly blunt take on the dynamic between director and actor: “Actors are deep; directors are shallow. Directors have to deal with a million different things, and you can’t be as deep as you would like to be; you don’t have time. Actors go deep into their past and the past of people they knew, and from that, we put together the film.” Sachs concurs, declaring that “actors do something on set which is inhuman, and directors do something very human: managing things.”
At the end of the Q&A, Sachs opens it to audience questions. One member ponders Clive’s sexuality, asking Ivory his read of him as a closeted gay man or as someone who aspires to a homosexual ideal because of his Greek classicist studies. Ivory suggests that: “[Clive] had an intellectual way of dealing with love, affection, and masculine love. It was not what we think of in a sexual way […] it was honest, it was what he felt. He thought it was going to bring everything down. It’s kind of crazy, but it’s how he lived.” There is something deeply unifying in listening to the audience interact with Ivory, witnessing this artistic homecoming: filmmaker and fan united in their appreciation of a piece of art, offering their interpretations and seeking answers from the artist himself. Gathered together, we woke each other up.
Images courtesy of the Paris Theater. Photography by M.J. O’Toole.
