OxfordPress.com

Grade: D+

Verdict: Comes all unraveled.

Details: Starring Madhur Jaffrey and Greta Scacchi. Directed by Ismail Merchant. Not rated, but there are explicit sexual situations and female nudity (sexual and maternal). 2 hours, 5 minutes.

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Review: Typically, the way the Ismail Merchant-James Ivory partnership ("A Room With a View") works is that the former produces and the latter directs. Now we know why.

Merchant decided to take another fling at directing — his first in several years — and the result is "Cotton Mary," a heavy-handed melodrama whose title character is a symbol with a capital S.

Cotton Mary (Madhur Jaffrey) — so-called because of her fondness for English cotton over the native Indian variety — is an Anglo Indian working as a hospital nurse in 1950s India, a country just learning what it means to be free of British imperialism. But Mary still prefers anything English to all things Indian. She even, in a perverse, self-loathing way, worships whatever rancid shards remain of colonialism.

To that end, she insinuates herself into a wealthy British household. The mother, Lily (Greta Scacchi), has just given birth and cannot nurse the newborn herself, a situation that Mary solves through a combination of shrewdness and secrecy that immediately grants her a certain power over the weak-willed Lily. It helps that the child's father (James Wilby) is less interested in his family than in his BBC stories and in chasing any available young woman, native or not.

Mary's strength and seeming devotion to "Madame" could be an asset, except for one tiny problem. Mary is nuttier than a Dickens fruitcake. Pretty soon, she's gone from pilfering from the pantry to parading through town in Lily's clothes (shades of "The Maids"). She even boldly invades Madame's veddy English club to get her hair done, much to the horror of the snobbish clientele.

As a study of class, racism, imperialism and other misbegotten caste systems, "Cotton Mary" offers fertile ground for some provocative ideas and complex confrontations. Unfortunately, Merchant seems to have been Cotton Mary'd himself.

He has worked with Jaffrey, who's best-known as a cookbook author, on three Merchant-Ivory films, and it was Jaffrey who brought him a draft of a grad-student play she had been touring with as a one-woman show. (Interestingly, Jaffrey receives co-director credit.) Perhaps her performance worked onstage, but on-screen, she makes Bette Davis at her campiest look restrained. Sashaying about with all the subtlety of a soap opera villainess, Jaffrey eradicates any challenging notions the movie might have offered. Simply put, if she had a moustache, she'd twirl it.

It's a shame, really, because the movie also offers beautiful locations, a fascinating attempt at a social study and a particularly lovely, low-key performance by Scacchi. But even the most devoted Merchant-Ivory fan will have a hard time cottoning to "Cotton Mary."

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service