A Room with a View is a 1985 British Drama film directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, who together were Merchant Ivory Productions. Merchant and Ivory are mainly known for their English period piece films. The movie stars Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Julian Sands, Simon Callow, Judi Dench, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Rupert Graves.
Plot
We meet Miss Lucy Honeychurch (played by Helena Bonham Carter) and her chaperone Charlotte Bartlett (played by Maggie Smith, )on holiday in Italy. Bemoaning the fact that they do not have a room with a view whilst having dinner in the hotel’s dining room, Mr. Emerson (Denholm Elliott) and his son, George (played by Julian Sands), gladly offer theirs. With their forward thinking and unrestrained temperament, the men are a clash against the two restrained and very proper Victorian ladies.
During a picnic in a rural barley field however, George embraces and passionately kisses Lucy. Charlotte quickly puts a stop to such shenanigans, and the two ladies promptly return to England. However, this is all too little too late as George has lit a secret desire and romance in Lucy’s heart that cannot be extinguished with English normality’s, and soon wackiness ensues.......
Review
During my school holidays as a young lad, I would spend many days in my father’s university in South Australia, getting up to no good in various art classes playing with clay, watching Perry Mason on a small black-and-white television under his desk or spending time in the library, reading comic-books and watching a lot of films.
Amongst my favourites were The Garbage Pale-Kids, a satire of the popular Cabbage-Patch kids at the time, the live action Masters of the Universe and The Last Star-Fighter. My sister’s favorite was A Room with a View. I watched it a few times and loved it for its brevity, its light-heartedness and beautiful visions of Italy. It would be many years afterwards that I would be actually in Rome, running around the Vatican taking photos and drinking in the sites, but before then, this was the movie that provided that gateway.
It was also my first introduction to the beautiful Helen Bonham Carter before her image was changed to a drugged-up goth thanks to the likes Tim Burton and David Fincher, and the excellent and passionate Julian Sands who went on to star in Warlock alongside Richard E Grant and was then lost in a slum of video-nasties. Obviously other actors of the movie went on to bigger and better things as the pedigree of Merchant and Ivory productions often tend to do.
I would say that I saw this film 3 or 4 times back then and I was amazed at how much I remembered of it. I think my repeated viewings of it prompted my dad to finally give me my first of many Elle Macpherson swimsuit calendars.
Rating
Inoffensive and Jane Austin lite, I give this delightful room 4 views out of 5
Check out the film at IMDB.
Luke McWilliams October 2010