Indian Summer

Most foreign words visit the English language with a limited visa; a few stay on for life. Very likely, the word guru is a temporary resident, booked for a return trip to India. Some future etymologist studying the phrases of the '60s will do well, then, to examine the content of the film The Guru. It provides a more acute and melancholy definition than any current dictionary.

One summer a young rock singer (Michael York) visits India searching for the new sound of the sitar. He pledges his fealty to a musician-mystic (Utpal Dutt) and becomes involved with a clattering entourage of fellow acolytes, musicians and the mandatory wide-eyed British bird (Rita Tushingham). Like Mia Farrow with the Maharishi, the singer finds that his lessons are exercises in disenchantment. The guru prates of selflessness but demands instant obedience to his whims. He hints of asceticism and keeps two wives busy and jealous. He considers himself a brilliant musician --until his guru denounces his technique as commercial flash and filigree.

As in his other films (The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah), Director James Ivory proves a precise and witty landscape artist. The Victorians may have traded in silks and spices, but, as Ivory shows, today's Elizabethans are in the culture export-import business. The proof is provided in contradictory fragments: a sitar sits near a hi-fi rig; a girl is dubbed a beauty queen with a rhinestone coronet that matches the jewel in her nose; groupies sleep on a temple's tessellated floors.

Unfortunately, once he has provided the detailed backdrop, Ivory and his co-scenarist, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, neglect most of the objects in the foreground. A face outlined here, a figure there, and they consider the task completed. It is not. The guru and the singer may be alive; the rest are actors sitting for sketches with only the vaguest dimension or purpose. Moreover, lines like "I feel so trapped. No one here understands me" tend to mock the film's painfully straight face.

Yet the examination of cultural dissolution and personal disillusion does much to restore the film to its proper stature--as a souvenir of a time already in recession. Sooner than anyone imagines, The Guru will serve to remind audiences of that peculiar, irretrievable time when Mod dogs and Englishmen went out in the noonday sun.

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