The Guru (1969)

A movie FXM put in its rotation recently that I had never heard of is The Guru. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow at 6:00 AM, and is on DVD from Fox's MOD scheme.

There's not all that much of a plot here. Michael York is Tom Pickle, a popular British singer who decides that he's going to go to India to study sitar under the great guru Ustal Khan (Utpal Dutt). Journalists in India aren't so sure that Tom gets the significance of the sitar to Indian traditional culture. And, to be honest, Tom seems to get the feeling that he's more there to learn how to play the sitar, and less for any sort of religious enlightenment.

Also there is Jenny (Rita Tushingham), who showed up in India and with guru Ustal specifically looking for enlightenment. She's taken with the guru, and he seems to be beginning to form an attachment with her. (One wonders how much these gurus ever took advantage of the people coming to "study" under them.) It's with that in mind that Ustal decides to take Jenny with him when Ustal goes to the holy city of Benares to visit his guru. Tom also goes along, and the experience changes both of them.

The Guru was an early film from the producer/director pairing of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, filmed on location in India; their frequent screenwriting collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is also the screenwriter on this one. It's those Indian settings that are the best thing about the movie, since the plot is badly dated and threadbare. I'd also say that it's at least moderately interesting for the look at the time and the era's odd idea that people would just go off to India to try to find enlightenment. The final point of interest is because it's early Merchant/Ivory.

FXM ran it in a 4:3 print which I would assume was panned and scanned, although I don't know what (if anything) it was panned and scanned from since I couldn't find the original aspect ratio on IMDb. I'd think that by the late 1960s, everything was in something wider than 4:3, but with low-budget movies in out of the way places (in cinema terms), one never knows.