Someone had the bright idea of sending Technicolor cameraman Jack Cardiff to India to film a series of travelogues. He came back with a series of images that have defined color cinematography to this day. More than eighty years later THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL still uses that brilliant white light and splashes of strong-chroma color, an effect like paintings on a whitewashed wall -- and completely different from the light he used for his British films. Cardiff was always the most painterly of the Technicolor cameramen and could achieve amazing effects -- once when Michael Powell said he wanted a slow fade in, Cardiff set the director behind the camera and breathed on the lens, fogging it: just the effect Powell had wanted.
The modern audience may be more interested in the casual racism of the narrator -- referring to "mysteries that white men are forbidden" and so forth, but the joy of this film, as with Cardiff's other travel movies -- indeed, with every movie he worked on, starting as a child actor in the silent era and working until his death in his nineties, lay in the image. Enjoy it for that.
The modern audience may be more interested in the casual racism of the narrator -- referring to "mysteries that white men are forbidden" and so forth, but the joy of this film, as with Cardiff's other travel movies -- indeed, with every movie he worked on, starting as a child actor in the silent era and working until his death in his nineties, lay in the image. Enjoy it for that.
