Cinema: A Stroll on the Wilde Side a Room with a View

Scandalous! Miss Honeychurch likes to play Beethoven on the pianoforte. This is not a composer with whom respectable young Edwardian women are supposed to become emotionally involved. And indeed, playing him makes her feel “peevish,” or perhaps guilty at allowing this expression of her passionate inner nature to burst out.

Still more scandalous! Young George Emerson, also a resident of the Pensione Bertolini in Florence, steals a kiss from her when they are out on an innocent picnic. And then does it again after a game of lawn tennis when they are back in England, where the climate is supposed to dampen such ardor. And what about Cecil Vyse, George? He may be a silly prig, but Lucy Honeychurch is now engaged to him. Have you forgotten the gentleman’s code?

E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View is like A Passage to India in miniature. But in his later novel, the sexual hysteria loosed in Miss Quested by her visit to an exotic land results in major melodrama. Lucy’s milder–and curable –case of the same malaise creates only a delightful Wildean farce. At least that’s all it does in this movie version of Forster’s minor and diverting novel. The formality of James Ivory’s style suits this spirit admirably, counterpointing and controlling the theatrical overplaying he encourages among his players. Maggie Smith as Lucy’s dithering chaperone is marvelous, and so is Denholm Elliott, blustering common sense as George’s father. Daniel Day Lewis as the well-named Vyse is terminally repressed, and Helena Bonham Carter establishes herself here (and in the recent Lady Jane) as one of the screen’s most intriguing newcomers. No one plays adolescent petulance better just now; no one better understands the budding young lady’s secret of being charming in spite of herself. Only Julian Sands as George has trouble getting things right. In him, inarticulate introspection often comes off as hunkish narcissism.

A small matter, though. A Room with a View seems to suit the emotional range (and the budgets) available to the Ivory-Jhabvala team better than its recent forays into the works of Henry James did. There is a lankishness about this picture that is both disarming and insinuating. Two cheers, at least, for permitting the past to appear not as a stern lesson but as a delicious irrelevance.