The perfect viewing for Valentine’s Day is the Merchant Ivory production of “A Room with a View”
If you haven’t seen this absolutely wonderful romantic comedy set at the end of the Edwardian era in England and Italy, stop reading right now and watch it for Valentine’s Day! (There are spoilers coming here.)
I was living on various Caribbean islands, sometimes without electricity or running water, in the mid 1980s when this film version of the E. M. Forster novel came out (1985), so I managed to miss it. Shortly after Thor and I got together in 2007, he was aghast that I hadn’t seen this one of his favorite movies, so we watched it for our first Valentine’s Day together. It’s now one of those special few that we’ve watched many times, and it never fails to delight.
The casting is inspired: Helena Bonham Carter perfect as pouting ingenue Lucy Honeychurch (her breakout role at only 18 years old), Daniel Day-Lewis brilliant as pretentious Cecil Vyse, Maggie Smith fussily prim and martyred as chaperone Charlotte Bartlett, Julian Sands romantically impetuous as George Emerson, Denholm Elliot lovably eccentric as his father the “free thinker” Mr. Emerson, Judi Dench as bossy romance novelist Eleanor Lavish, and Simon Callow tongue-in-cheek as the amiable Reverend Mr. Beebe. The minor characters, as well, ably flesh out the charming ensemble. Those Brits do know how to act!
The plot follows the novel fairly well, though of course condensed and concentrated to good gently-comic effect, with a lighter touch to the social satire of the original. It opens with young Lucy Honeychurch and her aging chaperone Charlotte Bartlett in Florence, Italy, disappointed that their promised “rooms with a view of the Arno” did not materialize. Instead, their windows open onto a bad-smelling alley. In the pensione dining room, the earnest but rough-mannered Mr. Emerson offers to swap his and his son’s rooms that have views, since “men don’t care about a view.” He then pokes himself with his fork in the region of his heart and proclaims, “Here is where the bird sings. Here is where the sky is blue.” Charlotte is deeply offended by the presumption of this stranger, and the others dismiss him as a “free thinker,” but Lucy is intrigued by him and his silent son, who shows her his dinner plate holding peas he has shaped into a question mark.
Mr. Beebe intercedes and persuades the ladies to accept the room changes. In the novel, Lucy wakes up the next day:
“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.”
Thor and I travelled in Italy in 2008, a hundred years after the publication of the novel, so I’m including here a few photos of places featured in the film. We stayed in a somewhat similar pensione in Florence…
…and these were our views:
And here is another view of the Arno River:
An amusing, brief scene has Charlotte and Eleanor wandering the back lanes of Florence and getting lost, as Eleanor insists that they will not consult the Baedeker guide book, but “simply drift.” Charlotte gags at the stink that Eleanor advises to breathe in as “a true Florentine smell.”
Lucy, against advice that a young woman should not go about alone in Florence, walks to the Piazza della Signoria, overwhelmed by the foreign surroundings and the heroic-sized sculptures featuring nudity and violence.
She passes the fountain of Neptune as two young Italian men suddenly get into a fight, and one of them is mortally injured. At the gush of blood, she faints, but George Emerson is also passing by and catches her, carrying her to rest on the steps of the church. Lucy tries to dismiss him and her own “embarrassing behavior,” but he insists on accompanying her back to the pensione. On the way, he throws the postcards she’s bought into the Arno because she had dropped them into a pool of the murdered man’s blood. He tells her that something extraordinary has happened, but she refuses to acknowledge it.
A later scene, set in the luminously beautiful countryside outside Florence, finds the pensione characters going for a picnic in a field of grasses and poppies. Lucy, wandering, encounters George, who sweeps her into a passionate embrace and kiss accompanied by the glorious voice of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Puccini. Charlotte catches them and hustles Lucy back to the safe propriety of England.
The setting shifts to the verdant countryside of the Honeychurch estate, where complications ensue as the Emersons rent a house nearby, after Lucy has been engaged to the pompous Cecil Vyse. Daniel Day-Lewis should have won an Oscar for his portrayal, which manages to comically mock Cecil but also render him human and vulnerable as Lucy finally emerges from his control and recognizes that she actually loves George Emerson.
Along the way, there are more terrific scenes, most notably when Lucy’s young brother, George, and Mr. Beebe go “bathing” nude in the “sacred lake,” only to be discovered by Lucy, her mother, and Cecil, who awkwardly tries to protect the ladies as Lucy bursts out laughing.
All ends happily, back at a room with a view in Florence.
*****
Aside from the wonderful ensemble work, the production is visually gorgeous, especially in Florence. A charming bit of fun is the use of “chapter” breaks and labels (echoing the novel’s chapter titles) that include painted “grotesques” popular in Italian art. The images were adapted from wall decorations in the actual Pensione Quisiana that provided the setting of the story’s Pensione Bertolini. Here is a similar example, a door-knocker that Thor and I saw in Florence:
I hope you join Thor and me tonight in watching this wonderful film! Happy Valentine’s Day!
*****
You will find The Rambling Writer’s blog posts here every Saturday. Sara’s latest novel from Book View Café is Pause, a First Place winner of the Chanticleer Somerset Award and an International Pulpwood Queens Book Club selection. “A must-read novel about friendship, love, and killer hot flashes.” (Mindy Klasky). It’s also a love letter to the stunning beauty of her native Pacific Northwest wild places. Sign up for her quarterly email newsletter at www.sarastamey.com
