Even I have a soft spot for the twilight of the Merchant Ivory period. My favorite film from that moment? The Remains of the Day, a movie that's based on a novel by a Japanese-English writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, scripted by the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants and wife of an Indian architect, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, directed by an American, James Ivory, produced by an Indian, Ismail Merchant, and starring a Welshman, Anthony Hopkins.

The City of Your Final Destination, a post-Merchant film (he passed away in 2005), is as international as The Remains of the Day. It is based on a novel by an American, Peter Cameron, scripted by Jhabvala, filmed by Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (he also shot Alejandro Amenábar's remarkable horror film The Others), and starring not only the famous Welshman but also an Egyptian-Dutch American, Omar Metwally, and the daughter of the Jewish French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg, Charlotte Gainsbourg.

The film is very agreeable, despite its pretentious-sounding plot—a 28-year-old graduate student flies to Uruguay to convince the family of an obscure author to give him permission to write an authorized biography. The family lives on a decaying ranch. They have lots of land but no money. The young student falls in love with the dead writer's second, young, and rather silly wife. While the writer was alive, his first wife—an older, majestic, and more beautiful woman (Laura Linney)—lived with the younger (and unofficial) second wife. Much to the writer's creative frustration, the two women accepted the unconventional arrangement and got along reasonably well. Indeed, it's implied that his second and last novel was never published because reality completely failed to furnish his weak imagination with the kind of drama that sells books—in this case, a domestic struggle to the death for the sole possession of the celebrated author. (This is my reading of the film; the novel might present a different interpretation.)

Altogether, Destination is a perfect art-house film and a kind of farewell to a filmmaking empire that was international and lasted four decades.