Search - Savages - The Merchant Ivory Collection on DVD

When Two Worlds Collide

Doug Anderson | Miami Beach, Florida United States | 10/31/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Savages is an art film with an outlandish but very clever premise and plot: what would happen if a tribe of primitive men & women stumbled into an abandoned English manor and were gradually transformed by their surroundings into the twentieth-century's social elite.

In the opening segment we are given a glimpse of the mud people who order their world according to rites and rituals (many of them related to fertility). Interestingly enough, the mud people are ruled by a high priestess and interestingly enough the mud people capture and enslave a dark-skinned & raven-haired female from another tribe. Already, at the dawn of civilization (at least in its English incarnation), a matriarchy is established and colonialism is a fact of life.

Later, after the mud people undergo their transformations in the manor the high priestess of the mud people will become a socialite & spiritualist who provides the refined English with a whole new set of rites and rituals, and the dark-skinned and raven-haired slave will still be their servant.

Other "types" are recognizable: the sensitive & thoughtful mud man becomes a scholar and poet in the manor, the aggressive alpha male mud man becomes a high-born social bully, etc...

After the transformation from mud people into English and American and German (and other) social types the film then becomes a parable (and parody) of the rise and fall of civilizations. Immediately after the mud people don English attire they are like children learning all they can about "civilization". Its immediately apparent that the sensitive types are interested in knowledge for its own sake while the bullying types are more interested in power and in learning new ways to dominate and exploit the others. Also in this youthful phase of civilization romance blossoms and they pair into twos and woo each other while playing games on the well-manicured English lawns. Norms are established but difference is tolerated as one of the most muscular males prefers dresses and one of the most diminutive females prefers suits. As the day progresses and the tribe begins to prepare for a dinner party they practice their dinner table conversation on each other: ie "can anyone tell me the derivation of the word bric-a-brac?" At the dinner table the lyrical peace of the afternoon is dissolved when the dominant males light their cigars and talk of international business and politics. (Some of) the females take this as a cue to head off into a salon where one mentions the fact that women are excluded from world events, but one of the females, unintimidated by ritual displays of male ego, stays behind and fearlessly challenges masculinist logic.

As the evening wears on the "civilized" sets' entertainments become more and more decadent, and innocent love is corrupted by more and more sophisticated (or is it more and more barbarous) forms of pleasure. One rich woman uses her social status to pressure the East Indian servant into an illicit affair in the back of her Rolls Royce. Cheating is a bigger turn-on than love and so two by two they sneak off and couple in the dark corners of the manor. And in the basement of the manor the social masks come off altogether when everyone indulges in a selfish free-for-all where the ultimate pleasure is the humilitation of others. Although the corpse of a jilted lover lies drowned at the bottom of the pool no one seems to care. The gold in the corpses pockets is the only thing that anybody sees fit to retrieve. The corrupt fill their pockets and their bellys while the sensitive brood the night away in solitude.

By next morning, everyone is at odds with everyone else, no one is talking to anyone, and no one has anymore patience with "civilizing" games, so one by one they return to the forest from whence they came.

Highly entertaining as an art house film. Like many films by directors who have yet to establish themselves this is full of inspired moments that are not necessarily followed through nor allowed to mature into anything more. Still, the overall effect (sort of Barbet Schroeder meets Luis Bunuel) is exhilerating. The diversity of acting styles (a mix of amateurs and pros) and personalities creates a lively experimental ambience that adds to the anything-can-happen spontaneity of the piece.

DVD extra: Includes an interview with director James Ivory and producer Ismael Merchant. Ivory discusses the abandoned English manor that gave them the idea for the film, the genesis of the script (which was in large part improvised on-the-spot), the fact that a Herzog documentary gave him the idea to have German anthropologists speak during the mud people segment, the casting of the actors (actors include Warholite Ultra Violet, and Sam Waterston), and how he wanted to cast George Plimpton (who declined to participate for unspecified reasons). Merchant discusses cooking for the crew in the manor's kitchen that everyone (but Ivory) thought was haunted.

(Another) DVD extra: A short 54 minute documentary film about Indian-turned-Englishman Nirad Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri is a fascinating scholar who fell out of favor with his own countrymen when he dedicated his first book to the British (just four years after Indian independence). Although Chaudhuri claims that he meant the dedication to be a criticism of the English empire (he claims that it was satiric in tone) his fondness for Alexander Pope & Rudyard Kipling, English tailoring & tea, and the fact that he has adopted England as his home seem to suggest that he does in fact prefer English order to Indian misrule. But Chaudhuri is not an easy man to read and his immense knowledge and intimate and nuanced understanding of both cultures makes him an ideal cultural anthropologist.

Most of this documentary takes place at Oxford where Chaudhuri fields questions from several Oxford students (several of them with long hair). When one asks him about westerners going east to find spiritual enlightenment, Chaudhuri is amused at the way eastern "spirituality" has been misrepresented. He claims that the western idea of eastern spirituality is a construction of German philosophers. In this way Chaudhuri seems to pave the way for thinkers like Edward Said who would later say that western scholars ("orientalists") constructed a largely self-serving version of "the east". But Chaudhuri's admiration for the west prevents him from attributing any malevolent motives to those who did this constructing and some may see Chaudhuri as resembling V.S Naipaul (another postcolonial subject who settled in England and adopted English airs) more than he resembles Edward Said. To this day Chaudhuri is a controversial figure. Either way you view him (as an apologist for Empire or as a critic of it) Chaudhuri is proof that world citizens do in fact exist. His transcultural learning and experience allow him unprecedented access and insight into both worlds and his observations are endlessly amusing and rich. Whether he is discussing the difference between English and Indian newspapers and the rhythms of the two languages or the role of women in society (he is a feminist although he despises feminist dogmas), he keeps you glued to the screen. Unfortunately, the sound quality of this documentary is extremely poor and a lot of what Chaudhuri says is simply grainy and undecipherable. Sound quality aside, this is a minor gem."