A Room with a View (1986)

 

Et værelse med udsigt

There are many interesting benefits from following a curated list. For me, the best is that I get to see (or read on my book blog) material, I would never otherwise have watched and sometimes it moves my idea of what my preferences are or should be. One such movie is “A Room with a View”.

It is very early twentieth century, and we find the young Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and her chaperone Charlotte (Maggie Smith) in Florence. Lucy is a tourist and has booked a room at a pension run by an Englishwoman and catering to English visitors. Greatly disappointed with the lack of a view, they are offered the room of the Emersons, father (Denholm Elliott) and son (Julian Sands), bringing them into contact. Lucy is very much the correct and stiff Victorian gentlewoman, but Florence has a troubling effect on her. George Emerson, raised as a free spirit, fascinates and scares the virginal Lucy and when he dares to kiss her on an outing, Lucy and Charlotte immediately leave, never to tell anybody about this terrible breach of decency. Except Charlotte apparently told Eleanor Lavish (Judi Dench), a novelist, about the incident.

Back in England, Lucy is courted by the arrogant and bookish Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis). She accepts his marriage proposal, but then the Emersons move into a nearby cottage and that opens a path for Lucy she thought had been long shut down. With Simon Callow as the insightful vicar Mr. Beebe.

The story itself is not particularly new. The repressed woman, keeping herself in a tight control dictated by social conventions, who meets somebody who helps her liberate herself to be the person she actually is. If you have watched “Titanic”, you know exactly what I mean. The special thing about “A Room with a View” is how elegantly it is done. There is that dash of comedy to keep it lively, that sense of who the characters are that makes them come alive as real people and just enough drama to feel something is at stake. There is never any doubt of the outcome, it can be predicted ten minutes in, but it is a joy to see it unfold.

That the characters are as fleshed out as they are, has of course a lot to do with the script, but I dare say that having quality actors in not just the key roles, but also in practically all supporting roles is definitely a factor. I mean, Judi Dench as the writer and Maggie Smith as the chaperone! A lot rests on Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy, and she turns out to be a lot more than just a pretty face. There is a fire in the character, but under very tight control. Her hair is a metaphor of her state. Wrapped tight in a braid or in a disciplined hairdo signal tight control but letting her hair out means she is letting go of that control. Something her surroundings are not keen on letting her do. The wilder her hair, the more she blossoms, even if it is because she is upset. It is then a liberating anger.

Daniel Day-Lewis’s Cecil Vyse is the villain in the sense that he represents the golden prison Lucy is about to walk into, but also because he comes about as both arrogant and mean. We are supposed to not like him. I am not as dismissive of him though. More than anything he is misplaced and entirely the wrong match for Lucy. In a sense, he is in as much need of liberation as her, he just does not know it. Or maybe he does near the end. He is socially clumsy and inept and masks it with arrogance. I actually feel sorry for him.

If there is a problem with “A Room view a View”, it is that as a novel being squeezed into a movie, there is a sense a lot of material missing. Especially George Emerson is not nearly enough fleshed out. There is a strong hint that there is a major story here, but that it simply did not make the cut and that makes him a bit like the prince in Snow White, not quite, but almost a non-entity.  

“A Room with a View” is a period piece in the romantic genre and almost the definition of a movie I would skip, but that would be a shame. It is actually a delightful movie.