I was wondering if we’d eventually see what I believe is James Ivory’s first “post” Ismail Merchant project – his long time partner passed away a couple of years back and the film with a stellar cast in Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, and Charlotte Gainsbourg was pretty much completed in 2007 and yet only saw the day of light at the Rome and Tokyo Film Festivals this past October. Were the money problems during post-production? Screen Daily reports that Screen Media Films have picked up the rights to The City Of Your Final Destination and are setting a March release date.
Here is the lengthy synopsis that we’ve got for the film. Based on the novel by Peter Cameron and Ruth Prawer Jhabval’s screenplay, this sees Omar Metwally as an Iranian-born graduate student at the University Of Kansas who travels to Argentina to seek permission from the family of a deceased Latin American author to write his authorized biography. Hopkins plays the author’s brother, Laura Linney his widow, Charlotte Gainsbourg his mistress and Hiro Sanada the lover of Hopkins’ character. Cameron’s novel concerns true love and a young academic’s struggle to break free from a life he’s molded but doesn’t want to live. Omar Razaghi, a twenty-eight-year-old doctoral student at the University of Kansas, has won a grant to write a biography of Jules Gund, a deceased Latin American writer. There’s just one obstacle: Gund’s family has not given him authorization. Undeterred, Omar travels to Uruguay, unannounced, to petition the author’s three executors in person: Gund’s widow, his much younger mistress, and his brother. Omar’s arrival sets in motion a series of events that upsets the precarious balance of life at Ochos Rios, the family’s crumbling estate. As long-standing relationships undergo seismic shifts and force the time-stuck inhabitants of Ochos to look toward that most dreaded of places: the future.
