Looking for a movie that affords a better view than your typical cineflick? Try this 1986 adaptation of E.M. Forster’s great 1908 novel, the best film (along with Howards End, another Forster adaptation) that the team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory ever made. It’s got Tuscany in all its summer glory (and Surrey doesn’t look too bad either). It’s got an all-star cast. Best of all, it has Forster’s vision.

A Room with a View is, after all, a novel about how to see. And the film alerts you to the importance of looking closely right from the opening credits: the handsome Florentine paper on which the cast members are listed sports traditional designs at first, but when we switch to the English contingent, that’s Tower Bridge in the tendrils’ loving embrace, and what follows incorporates dragons (for Wales) and unicorns (for Scotland). Listening is important too: the Puccini aria “O mio babbino caro” (from Gianni Schicchi) that Kiri Te Kanawa sings over those credits has a young Florentine girl telling her daddy that she’ll throw herself into the river Arno if he doesn’t let her marry the boy she’s just fallen for. Later, when George Emerson wades through that sea of barley stained with poppies and impulsively kisses Lucy Honeychurch, we hear “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta” (more Puccini, from La rondine), about how a young girl is awakened to love by a student’s passionate kiss. And Lucy finds herself to the strains of “Praise My Soul the King of Heaven,” the same hymn over which Gabriel and Bathsheba come together in John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.

The story is simple enough. Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) is in Florence for the first time, with her fussbudget cousin/chaperone Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith), and the cockney signora of the Pensione Bertolini has promised them a room with a view of the Arno, but of course they don’t get it. Coming to the rescue are rough diamonds Mr. Emerson (Denholm Elliott) and his son George (Julian Sands), who do have a view and would be happy to trade with the ladies. Charlotte agrees reluctantly — she knows where this sort of offer can lead. Already it’s too late: Lucy now has a glorious panorama of the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio, but she’s also gotten a good look at George. She’s offended when the freethinking young man kisses her in that waist-high field of barley, but not nearly as offended as Charlotte, who whisks her back to England on the next train.

Gorgeous in its own manicured way, Windy Corner in Surrey still looks like prison after we’ve seen Italy — and doubly so once Lucy accepts the marriage proposal of stuffed-shirt/wet-blanket Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day Lewis). Inevitably Mr. Emerson and George turn up, and just as inevitably George kisses Lucy again. This time she’s properly insulted, and she tells George off, but after reflecting on Cecil’s brotherly smooching and his patronizing admission that he’s “no good for anything but books,” she dumps him. It’s not that easy to “see” her way to marrying George, but with help from Charlotte and Mr. Emerson she does; when spring comes around, they’re back in Florence, with a view of the city and, better yet, each other.

For us the choice between the Hunk and the Bookworm is almost too easy (check Lucy’s face when she hears Cecil decline to play tennis), but Merchant and Ivory serve up plenty of other things to look at, listen to, and think about. The camera all but caresses the sacred pond where George, Lucy’s brother Freddy (Rupert Graves), and the Reverend Mr. Beebe (Simon Callow) bathe au naturel, and Richard Robbins’s score gleams with a wistful yearning that could easily be Forster’s. The music grows even more wistful when it turns to spinster sisters Catherine and Teresa Alan (Fabia Drake and Joan Henley), who are destined to go to Athens and Constantinople without Lucy. Then there’s Mr. Emerson, who says he must be where George is — what happens to him when George marries Lucy? (Think of the touching moment when George kisses his father on the forehead.) And finally Charlotte, who’s been the butt of the movie’s humor (when she says, for the umpteenth time, “I shall never forgive myself,” a weary Lucy replies, “Yes but you always do”): after she’s seen what we do and nudged Lucy toward George, we find her in bed reading Lucy’s letter from Florence, and the look of unfulfilled longing on the magnificent Maggie Smith’s face is a sight all by itself.

Issue Date: July 12-19, 2001