Savages is certainly interesting and has more merit
than it lacks, but in attempting to poach on territory already notably owned by
Luis Buñuel and Ken Russell, director James Ivory is pathetically out of his
depth. The film is much more in league
with highly pretentious experiments in excess of the time like Pasolini’s Teorema
(1968) and Porcile (1969), Godard's La
Chinoise (1967), and other such things, except replacing sordid Franco-Italian
decadence with British farce. The basic
concept is fascinating; a primitive tribe called the “Mud People” seems to
breach a time barrier and stumble into a contemporary country estate, where
they morph into well-mannered aristocrats, only to slowly regress into savagery
and ritualism over the course of a weekend. These are ideas dealt with in far less affected
and clumsy ways by Buñuel famously in The Exterminating Angel (1962) and
even in his film released the same year as Ivory’s Savages; The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
Ivory would later seem much more comfortable with the stately
adaptations of E.M. Forster novels for which he became famous, like A Room
with a View (1986) and Howards End (1992).
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