|
|
List Price: $14.98Amazon.com's Price: $12.99 You Save: $1.99 (13%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy Now!
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0025192097928
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Label: Universal Studios
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Universal Studios
Region Code: 1
Release Date: January 30, 2001
Running Time: 124 minutes
Sales Rank: 32803
Studio: Universal Studios
Theatrical Release Date: 1999
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
The Merchant Ivory production company (which were also responsible for A Room With a View, Howard's End, and The Remains of the Day, among others) is the driving force behind Cotton Mary, the story of an Anglo-Indian nurse obsessed with becoming part of the British upper class. When Lily (Greta Scacchi from White Mischief and The Player) gives birth to a baby girl, she's unable to produce milk. Cotton Mary (Madhur Jaffrey) promises to take care of the child and secretly takes the baby to her sister, a wet nurse. Soon Lily feels dependent on Mary for the baby's health, and she takes the nurse into her home. Mary immediately starts to consolidate her power in the household by poisoning Lily's mind against the other servants and trying to get her relatives hired in their place. But when Lily's husband John hires Mary's attractive niece as a translator, the resulting affair threatens to unravel all of Mary's plans. Cotton Mary is beautifully filmed, with a sharp eye for the hypocrisies of colonialism. The setting of southern India makes for some vivid images, particularly when Lily's older daughter gets lost in a late-night parade. Though the pace is slow, several scenes capture the mixture of social conflict and personal demons that drive Mary to scheme and manipulate everyone around her. --Bret Fetzer
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Cotton Mary
Very well written...a good movie for people who have lived through the British era in India and not of pure Indian decent. The struggle to find ones place between the Pompus British who over took India and the Anglo Indian wanting so much to belong.
Rating:  - Cotton Mary - Speaks!
Servile, cunning, ingratiating and conniving... these adjectives pretty much sum up Mary's character for me. Sexually prudish, yet ambitious for some social standing, she sees her opportunity come in the form of a newborn while working as a nurse. The mother is British, the baby premature. The mother is not producing milk, and Mary takes the infant to a crippled wet nurse where the baby is eventually restored to health. Lily, the mother, offers her a job as an ayi in the house, which Mary of course ... Read More
Rating:  - Very Subtle...BUT DEFINITELY worth a serious look...
I was somewhat dismayed to read the negative reviews of this movie. First, we MUST take into account the movie-making team responsible for this film, a team working together, historically, on so many films of similar theme over the years:the British in India. Their effort is unique, this turn, because the action rolls a scant seven years after the last British Viceroy left India to its own self-rule... after a two hundred year "guardianship". What was left in the wake of those two hundred years? ... and ... Read More
Rating: - Not a block buster but a very fine movie
But tell me why that cover on the DVD/Video sleeve? Yes, there is an extra marital but nothing like THAT cover. I found the movie absorbing, beautifully filmed and interesting historically/colonialism.
Rating:  - Preposterous story but fine acting and cinematography
This 1999 Merchant-Ivory production is set in India in 1954. A wealthy British woman gives birth to a small baby. As she is not able to breastfeed, the hospital nurse, named Cotton Mary, who proudly proclaims that she is half-English herself, makes the woman dependent upon her and moves into the rich woman's house as a servant. Cotton Mary never tells the mother how she is feeding the baby, but the viewer watches Cotton Mary take the baby in a boat each day to visit her own crippled sister who is a wet ... Read More
|
|
