Heat and Dust (1983)

Two love stories, sixty years apart. In 1920s British India, Greta Scacchi's Olivia scandalizes the colonial set with her attachment to Shashi Kapoor's Nawab; in the 1980s strand, Julie Christie plays the great-niece retracing her steps. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted her own Booker Prize-winning novel and won the BAFTA for the screenplay. The cutting between eras is the point: the same landscape, the same temptations, very different freedoms. The best bridge between the Indian films and the English ones that followed.