A Room With a View

It's time for another of the movies that I had the chance to record thanks to the free preview of the Showtime channels. That would be the Merchant-Ivory film A Room With a View. It's going to be on again tomorrow, at noon on Flix, so once again, I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

It's 1907, and there's a class of idle rich Britons who are able to go on long vacations to all sorts of places in Europe, such as Florence, Italy. One such pair are you Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and her much older cousin Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). They get to the pension where they'll be staying, and are disappointed to see that they've got a room at the back of the place, which means it overlooks an alleyway rather than having one of those great views of the palazzo and piazza and Arno river and the like.

This gets brought up at dinner, which is one of those affairs when everybody is expected to eat at roughly the same time, so a large group of Britons are at the same table along with Lucy and Charlotte. Among them are the Emersons, a father (Denholm Elliott) who is there as much for his health as for the tourism, and his adult son George (Julian Sands). George immediately offers to switch suites with the two women so that they can have a view, he already having had it and not needing more of it. Charlotte isn't so sure that young Lucy should be talking to a strange unmarried young man without responsible adults having introduced the pair first.

These being Brits abroad and not too many of them, it's unsurprising that they're an insular little community, constantly bumping into each other in the same places because they use the same guidebooks. So eventually George and Lucy not only bump into one another again, but spend a little time walking around the back streets of Florence. And then, when Lucy and Charlotte on one hand and the Emersons on another wind up renting carriages to see the countryside and have some picnics, George takes Lucy and kisses her, thinking they're alone. Charlotte sees it and is horrified, after which Lucy and Charlotte return to England.

Back in England, Lucy lives with her mother and her younger brother Freddy (Rupert Graves), waiting to reach the age where she'll receive her inheritance, and being called on by men such as Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis), who eventually proposes to Lucy and the proposal is accepted. Meanwhile, the local vicar has a cottage sitting idle that he's planning to rent out to make some money for the parish. Somebody met the Emersons down in London, and suggested to the vicar that old Mr. Emerson be a tenant. This leads to George coming up on the weekends to visit his father, and naturally running into Lucy again as a result. Mom, of course, doesn't know anything about what happened between Lucy and George in Florence because Charlotte didn't tell her.

George, being a passionate man, is still in love with Lucy. But, of course, she's engaged to Cecil, who is exactly the opposite of George. In a world where Lucy would never have expected to see George again, it's easy enough to compromise and marry Cecil. But now that he's back, she has to lie to herself about not being in love with George.

The story in A Room With a View is a darn good one, although the relatively slow Edwardian pacing and the romance may mean it won't appeal to some viewers, especially younger males. And it's not really a family movie, especially with one skinny-dipping scene which, while tastefully done, is still there. But the movie is absolutely worth the watch for everyone else, thanks in part to the fine performances, and in part to the production values. Merchant and Ivory make the film look gorgeous.

If you haven't seen A Room With a View before, I can highly recommend it.