Sometimes it can take three, four or even several hours for a film-maker to tell their tale or sometimes just several minutes and sometimes a director will make a feature that is the cinematic equivalent of a short story. "Autobiography of a Princess" falls very much into this category. It's a Merchant/Ivory picture, again with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and made in 1975. It lasts less than an hour and is basically a two-hander in which an Indian princess living in London, (Madhur Jaffrey) and her father's former tutor, (James Mason), spend an afternoon drinking tea and watching home movies of life in a past India.
It's no masterpiece but it's superbly acted, particularly by Mason who underplays beautifully and, of course, in very little time it says a great deal about India's past and England's present, the class system in both countries and the psychological makeup of the two participants in this annual orgy of nostalgia for bygone days. It's clear the team making this film have no real fondness for the events we see but Merchant/Ivory are too clever to simply attack them. This is a very subtle demolition job captured in Jaffrey's prattling on and in Mason's pained expressions. It makes a perfect companion piece to the later "Heat and Dust" and is an essential part of the Merchant/Ivory canon.
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