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The natives are restless in Merchant's 'Cotton Mary'

Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 5, 2000
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"COTTON MARY," the scary new Ismail Merchant, movie has a pristine veneer for a few of its 123 minutes.

An Indian nurse (Madhur Jaffrey) ingratiates herself into the home of a visiting British family and cares for their newborn. When mommy can't bring herself to feed her infant, the nanny's handicapped sister secretly (Neena Gupta) plays wet nurse.

The film has the kind of nonplused mein that Merchant's usual partners James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala can pull out of a top hat while sleepwalking. But when Merchant is not producing their joint ventures - as his three solo features testify - he thinks beyond Victorian sexual repression and tidy class angst.

Merchant is like the experimental guy in a supergroup who's got that one idea for a record that's just not right for the band. "Cotton Mary," with its grotesquerie and post-colonial nightmarishness, is a good example.

Adapted by Alexandra Viets' from her play, the film is about a British family living in India as some kind of poisoned paradise, indulgent, hypocritical, lusting after that which is not like itself. Merchant, though, turns the story into a freaky, campy musing about an Indian nanny wreaking havoc on a household. The tag lines in the trailer could make this sound juicy: They thought she looked like the perfect servant to watch their children while they frolicked and fretted, cheated and idled, slurping up all the spicy nectar in this scenic utopia. They were wrong. Terror has a new name this spring. Say hello to "Cotton Mary."

If the family in Curtis Hanson's "The Hand That Rocked the Cradle" had half a mind to hire Whoopi Goldberg to help around the house instead of Rebecca DeMornay, it may have come

out something like this - less sensational, but far more carnivalesque. Set in the 1950s, a few years after India reclaimed its independence from England, the film purports to be a set piece about how tainted Anglo-Indian relations warped both cultures. But it's really just a lurid potboiler.

John Mackintosh (James Wilby) is a multitasking aesthete who transplants his pregnant wife Lily (Greta Scacchi), his daughter, and loyal butler, Abraham (Prayag Raj), to India where he works as a journalist and stage actor, flirting with whatever chicky happens to be starring opposite him. Lily is in no condition to be a sterling mother to her new daughter, and you're not sure whether she's dismayed by her jolly husband's benign neglect or the suspicion that the overly polite Indian midwife cast some kind of spell on her during labor. She called herself Cotton Mary; she told the annoyingly passive Lily about her white soldier father whose picture she carries in a locket, and she kept insisting that this new baby "is a child of God, madam." Soon, she's in the Mackintosh home, trying to get Abraham fired so she can hire her temptress niece (Sakina Jaffrey).

What lends "Mary" it's off-kilter sense of the bizarre is Merchant's two-dimensional staging. The camera peers in on a scene, then recoils, often clinically, to the other side of a room, as though filming a play or as if reluctant to get terribly involved with the proceedings for fear of contamination, either by Mary or by Viets' very rudimentary story. But Mary's demons are the province of her collapsing psyche and engorged aspirations of becoming white, Lily white, no less. Jaffrey plays it like Anna Magnani in a David Lynch telefilm. Her Mary is the cracked portrait of deranged

post-colonial dementia, hung in the biggest, broadest frame you put on a wall.

But did Merchant have to make her madness seem so illogically soapy? It's as though, in documenting cultural queerness afoot, he skipped the institution and went straight for the loony bin.

Movie Review

'Cotton Mary'

CAST Madhur Jaffrey, Greta Scacchi, James Wilby, Prayag Raj

DIRECTOR Ismail Merchant

WRITER Alexandra Viets, adapted from her play


THEATERS Opera Plaza Cinema, San Rafael Film Center

EVALUATION * * 1/2 &lt;