Cotton Mary

Could this be the Great Breast-Feeding Movie? Maybe, but Ismail Merchant's latest attempt to document every micron of the British-in-India experience is also a creepily unpleasant study of race and class with a plot by way of ALL ABOUT EVE and SUNSET BOULEVARD. Lily (Greta Scachi), the unhappy wife of a BBC correspondent stationed in southern India circa 1954, goes into labor unexpectedly. After the baby is born she finds she can't nurse, dooming her newborn (what, no infant formula?). Enter Cotton Mary (Madhur Jaffrey), an ambitious Anglo-Indian hospital attendant who swoops the baby off to her sister, a wet nurse living in an alms house. Within days, Mary has sna...