Heat and Dust

Director: James Ivory

1982, UK, 132 min

Cast: Julie Christie, Shashi Kapoor, Greta Scacchi, Julian Glover Susan Fleetwood

 

(UK, 1982) Director: James Ivory. Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on her novel. Cast: Julie Christie, Shashi Kapoor, Greta Scacchi, Julian Glover Susan Fleetwood.

The screening of a 4K restoration of Heat and Dust is dedicated to Shashi Kapoor, who died in 2017 after a long and brilliant career, acting in 168 films that made him the ‘Bollywood Crossover King’.
Heat and Dust is one of three films he made with director James Ivory, based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Julie Christie plays a young woman who travels to India to find out more about her ‘scandalous’ Aunt Olivia (Greta Saachi), who lived in India under British rule. The film moves back and forth in time as the married Olivia falls for a seductive Indian Nawab (Kapoor), and Christie tries to forge a more independent path for her own life. 132 min
“When it is over, we’re a little surprised to find that it is angry. Angry that women of every class and every system, women British and Indian, Women of the 1920s and of the 1980s, are always just not quite the same caste as men”. – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.