Heat and Dust [Blu-ray]

The simple narrative allows for a visual delight. A scandalous romance in 1920's India recreates the Raj in a very credible manner.Some 60 years later, the Julie Christie character tries to retrace her great-aunt's footsteps and has her own (slightly less scandalous) romance.The twin romances are of no great depth, but the depiction of the huge contrast between India under the Raj and India as an independent nation is first-rate. One would welcome an update: India has changed significantly over the past 40 years and the contrast would be even more telling.As well as being beautifully shot, the film is well acted. A minor complaint I have is that Christie's character comes across as a little too perfect. Just a minor flaw or two would have added depth.4* with no hesitation at all.

A beautiful portrait of an India that is disappearing quickly and the East West cultural conflict of its time that still persists today, for better or worse.

The concept was great but the focus was not as clearly defined defined or developed as it could have been. It was great to see Scacchi and Christie in their earlier work as both are terrific in their roles. Slow at times. Viewers often become enamored with (a 1983) foreign film and fail to critique it fairly. The Viceroy's house does a great depiction of the actual events in India and Pakistan that were heavily influenced by England (and the USA), despite the (required) interwoven forbidden love element.

Heat and Dust is one of my top 10 favorite movies. My taste runs to "quiet, romantic, or quirky British movies," and favorites include "Secrets and Lies" and "Enchanted April." If you share these inclinations and love Julie Christie and Greta Scacchi, this is for you.

This was a terrible movie. Too much nudity and not much of a story. Not worth watching and wasting you time. Merchant and Ivory have made better movies.

Unlikable characters and poor narrative flow. Waste of money.

One of my favorite Indian movies showing the challenging, tense and sometimes romantic days of the Raj compared with the India of the sixties, seventies and eighties when I used to visit quite frequently. Rather a "chick flick" though, but lovely scenery and costumes. A handsome, dashing, single prince notices the recently arrived, attractive young wife of a junior British Civil Service Officer and things become rather unglued. Decades later, her niece follows her to India to reconstruct the family mystery, but there's something about India.............At the time I used to travel there I said that India was the most exotic and exciting country in the world where most people visitors would interact with would speak English. I still truly believe we have an emotional tie to India, through its history (prior to the Brits as well as after), underlying philosophies, poetry, art, science, medicine and a great appreciation of beauty. Not to mention that our languages in the west are "Indo-European." It's the only recently freed colony in the world that I can imagine that would have its military band play "Auld Lang Syne" as the last British troops departed aboard ship from the Gateway of India at Bombay.I also told my Art Museum groups (I planned tours for Art Museum patrons at that time) that India would become an economic powerhouse in the 21st, century and, of course, back in the 80's everyone thought I was crazy. Indians are a brilliant, resourceful and industrious people and a high proportion are very well educated. We should pay attention.

I loved this movie back in the 80s and this new release makes it look even more beautiful than I remembered.

This Merchant Ivory production superbly evokes the India of the British Raj in the 1920s, the landscapes, the diverse people, the costumes, but above all, the issues and the defining narratives of the period. Present in the cast are the Burra ("proper") Sahibs and Memsahibs who are the pillars of the Empire, as well as the fashionable young free spirits, typified by the Julie Christie character, who puts it about quite a bit and unwittingly symbolises the decline and fall of British Rule in India and the demise of the Empire. Central are the young newly-weds played by Christopher Casenove and Greta Scacchi, of whom the latter, as "Olivia", is NOT a Burra Memsahib; but, on the contrary, she lets down both her husband and the "side" by becoming involved extramaritallywith a duplicitous, in a word, crooked, Nawab, played by Shashi Kupoor. The inevitable march of events unfolds, from her pregnancy by the Nawab, to its termination, to the Nawab being deposed and his princely state being subsumed into British India, his death and Olivia's internal exile This film brings the whole intrigueing panoply of a bygone era to life in a way that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novel in my view does not.

Along with Paul Scott's 'Staying On', my favourite film/book on the english in india. The Merchant Ivory movie version of H&D with Greta Scacchi and Julie Christie very special, but the book, as ever, has much more detail and observation of peripheral characters. Audiobook version, narrated by the divine Christie, is heaven. Set in parallel, partially epistolary narratives in the '20s and 50 years later, wonderfully observed and beautifully written by the fascinating, late, great Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The film version focuses very much on the beautiful Olivia and her inevitable, doomed, desire for the Nawab - heat and lust.

The movie is great.However, for those expecting a reasonable quality DVD you will be disappointed. The sound quality is poor and the movie looks as if it was shot through a net curtain - more like a camcorder ‘rip’ from the back row of the local flea pit.This seems to be a recurring problem as other DVD’s I’ve bought from the BBC, (Gormenghast was of remarkably awful quality), and from “4”, have repeatedly failed to be of an acceptable standard.If you can grin and bear the woeful recording quality, and still enjoy the wonderful story and acting in this movie, it’s worth a couple of quid – but I’d rather have seen it on Netflix or Amazon Prime.Having such a poor quality DVD in my collection is like having a cuckoo in the nest.

I was disappointed with this film, but I have also just finished watching The Jewel in the Crown, so I may be comparing it unfairly to that stunning production. I found the first hour extremely boring - after that it did improve, but only in the storyline concerning the 1920s. The story of Anne I thought was very superficial and frustrating. The characters in the 1980s storyline were underdeveloped and the American character was irritating. The relationship between Anne and her Indian lover lacked chemistry, as another reviewer has said, and seemed pointless. Perhaps I just don't want to think back to that awful period in the 1980s when people became hippies! Greta Scacchi is beautiful and is a great actor (I also agree with another reviewer that misspelling her name on the DVD cover was poor), and Shashi Kapoor was also good. The ending was too abrupt, but very sad. I think more could have been done to develop the characters fully and stop this production from being superficially beautiful but lacking in real meaning.

To be frank good though this film is I felt the image was rather disappointing. Presumably it’s how the motion picture was shot but it’s very soft and grainy at times.