The press blurb for “A Cooler Climate,” a 75-minute documentary from veteran director and writer James Ivory, calls it “deeply personal,” but this is a relative term in his case. At 94 years of age, Ivory is an extraordinarily reticent man, and that is partly a result of being born in a certain time and place. There is only so much he can or will reveal about himself before retreating and closing several doors firmly behind him.
The impetus behind “A Cooler Climate” was the chance to showcase color footage that a young Ivory shot in Afghanistan in 1960 with the idea of making a documentary. This was a few years before he made his first narrative feature with his longtime partner and producer Ismail Merchant, with whom he eventually made a series of prestigious literary adaptations in the 1980s and 1990s with screenplays by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Ivory’s literary adaptations rely on top-tier British acting talent like Maggie Smith, Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Redgrave, and especially the very melancholy yet driving and edgy musical scores from Richard Robbins. In his recent memoir “Solid Ivory,” Ivory mentions that Robbins was also Merchant’s lover, an alliance that does not seem to have threatened the primacy of their own relationship; if it ever did, Ivory does not say so.
There are many things that Ivory does not say in his narration of “A Cooler Climate,” which is scored in a sprightly fashion by Alexandre Desplat that in no way evokes the lush sadness of Robbins’ music for Merchant-Ivory films. Ivory was born into a wealthy family and raised in Oregon, and his father owned a lumber mill that supplied some of the timber for the sets for MGM movies. Ivory’s voice has an old-fashioned cultivated quality that is nearly mid-Atlantic; he pronounces the word photogenic as “photo-gee-nic.”
Ivory describes a moment in his childhood when he asked for a dollhouse and a group of adults laughed at him; he tells us that he didn’t want to play with dolls but wanted a way of designing sets and furnishing rooms, for furnishings were always his abiding visual passion in Merchant-Ivory pictures like “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day.” Ivory claims that when the adults laughed at him, he felt special or set apart, but some of the photographs shown on screen tell a different story. The young Ivory often looks like he is in pain, and his face also shows a deep amount of anger and resentment, but neither here nor in his memoir does he explore those emotions.
The sections of “A Cooler Climate” that show his Afghanistan footage have value because the world it is capturing has vanished. There is a particularly poignant moment when we see footage Ivory took of a large Buddha statue that had survived in Afghanistan for thousands of years but was destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban.
Ivory’s understanding of Afghanistan was basic then, and it still sounds somewhat basic now. The all-but-unspoken subtext of “A Cooler Climate” is that the young and very repressed Ivory went to this country partly because he wondered if he could be freer there about his sexuality, which he felt he could not act on at home in Oregon.
The most honest moment in this movie is when Ivory tells of meeting two older Afghan men who befriended him quickly and invited him home, where Ivory was left wondering if they might want sex with him. They didn’t, or so it would seem, but Ivory describes a mixture of desire and dread that seems to have been characteristic of him then and is also characteristic of this documentary.
“A Cooler Climate” ends abruptly with a description of Ivory meeting Merchant, and there is a photo of Merchant staring adoringly at Ivory that maybe says it all about their relationship. For fans of Ivory’s films, “A Cooler Climate” reveals more about him than his memoir did, but on certain subjects he remains as tight-lipped as he needed to be in his youth.
“A Cooler Climate” makes its world premiere at the 2022 New York Film Festival.