In August 2023 I made my first, belated post-pandemic sojourn abroad, confident at long last that tests, masks and health bureaucracy were behind us. On the last day of that holiday, prior to returning to a stubbornly grey Britain, I covered every inch of Florence’s historic centre, willing the warmth, the light, and the very essence of the place to somehow seep in through my skin. Younger versions of myself seemed to shadow me, walking quietly in step: the 18-year-old, excited to be independent, abroad, and in love for the first time; the more serious PhD student, a decade later, traipsing alone the length of the Oltrarno between cheap pensione and archive. Nostalgia had been a constant companion during the lockdowns, and, once liberated, there was a reason why it felt imperative to return to Florence, for it was a city that held emblematic personal significance.

That significance stemmed back to a film borrowed from a video rental shop in the late 1980s, which had been transformative, giving me a love of Italy, a fascination with the Edwardian era, and even – in introducing me to opera – the inspiration for a future career as a music historian. I was far from alone in loving A Room with a View so much that I wanted to kick down the fourth wall and step inside its world. Many were the people who organised themed parties around it and affected a habit of dressing in cream linen and boater hats, as Stephen Soucy’s new film about Merchant Ivory Productions reveals.

A Room with a View (1985) was the breakthrough hit for producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory – partners both in art and in life, though the latter fact was long carefully concealed. Ivory hadn’t been keen to make another period drama straight after The Bostonians and it almost didn’t get made, yet the film would be the making of the pair, far exceeding expected takings for an ‘arthouse’ film. The Merchant Ivory heyday endured for almost a decade, encompassing seminal masterpieces such as Howards End and The Remains of the Day. Ample space is devoted in Soucy’s comprehensive documentary to these major works, but he also has much to say about the lesser-known Merchant Ivory oeuvre, spanning the period from the early 1960s to the late 2000s. The first films were often set in India (notably 1965’s Shakespeare Wallah, which starred Felicity Kendal in a story based on her father’s real-life acting troupe). Late ones included further historical adaptations (The Golden Bowl) but also biopics (Surviving Picasso) and, increasingly, adaptations of contemporary novels (Le Divorce, The City of Your Final Destination). It was an irony that when big Hollywood money stepped in, critical ratings went down.

Given the cinematographic opulence of the big hits, it comes as a revelation to discover that they were shot on a shoestring. Merchant was often still raising funds when a film was part-way through production, and several contributors to Soucy’s film hint that you didn’t want to ask too many questions about where the money was coming from. Costume designers recall him suggesting that since he had garnered them an Oscar, perhaps they didn’t need paying; Anthony Hopkins once started legal action over unpaid fees. The casting in The Bostonians of the political firebrand Vanessa Redgrave (then involved in an extreme leftist group with revolutionary aspirations) saw financiers pull funding.

Manners were evidently less refined off-screen than on, with hot tempers and heated arguments aplenty, yet there was also great warmth between cast members and crew, and sometimes more than that. Complicated relationships are hinted at: composer Richard Robbins was involved sexually with Merchant and emotionally with Bonham Carter. Hugh Grant notes wryly that it was a time when ‘film sets crackled with subliminal lust’, whereas today everyone just looks at their phones. Ivory would host the actors for long creative residencies at his home in Claverack, in upstate New York, the rather unexpected centre of operations for these oh-so-European films. Merchant, having driven everyone to distraction, would win them back round by cooking a sumptuous banquet. ‘This rascal has done it again – again he has charmed us,’ recalls Madhur Jaffrey. ‘He was a conman,’ Ivory laughs. Soucy has a gift for eliciting an unguarded remark.

The documentary explores both thematic content – the bravery of tackling the still-taboo topic of homosexuality in Maurice – and questions of artistic process: screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s approach to adaptation, the influence of Philip Glass’s music on Robbins’s score for The Remains of the Day, Ivory’s directorial modus operandi of casting the best possible actors and leaving them to it. There was clearly a great sense of camaraderie and of loyalty in the enterprise: Ivory cultivated something akin to a repertory company, remembering actors who had taken on small roles and inviting them back years later. Though Emma Thompson recalls that being in a Merchant-Ivory film required extreme stamina, and everyone would say ‘never again’, they could always be seduced back, by the artistic freedom Ivory gave them and by the sheer beauty of the finished object.

Over the last decade or so, we have seen drastic change in the period drama genre, since the rise of a generation of directors who are sniffy about what has often been labelled ‘heritage cinema’. Most modern adaptations of classic novels, with their metaphorical eyerolling and their ironic pop soundtracks, emanate a palpable disdain for attention to period-specificity in anything other than costume design. Stephen Soucy’s documentary reminds us just how good period dramas used to be, even on a meagre budget, and what magical things could happen when you assembled a team of brilliant actors, gave them first-rate material and asked them to play it straight. His film is a fine, clear-eyed tribute to a body of work that made so many of us who grew up in the later 20th century dream that another world had once existed, infinitely more beautiful, infinitely more civilised. A sort of template, as Rupert Graves muses in the film, for how one should live one’s life.