| A Room with a View | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | James Ivory |
| Screenplay by | Ruth Prawer Jhabvala |
| Based on | A Room with a View 1908 novel byE. M. Forster |
| Produced by | Ismail Merchant |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Tony Pierce-Roberts |
| Edited by | Humphrey Dixon |
| Music by |
|
Production companies | |
| Distributed by | Curzon Film Distributors |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 117 minutes[1] |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | |
| Box office | $21 million[2] |
A Room with a View is a 1985 Britishromance film directed byJames Ivory and produced byIsmail Merchant. It was written byRuth Prawer Jhabvala, who adaptedE. M. Forster's 1908 novelA Room with a View. Set in England and Italy, it is about a young woman named Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) in the final throes of the restrictive and repressed culture ofEdwardian England and her developing love for a free-spirited young man, George Emerson (Julian Sands).Maggie Smith,Denholm Elliott,Daniel Day-Lewis,Judi Dench andSimon Callow feature in supporting roles. The film closely follows the novel by the use of chapter titles to distinguish thematic segments.
A Room with a View received universal critical acclaim and was a box-office success. At the59th Academy Awards it was nominated for eightAcademy Awards (includingBest Picture) and won three:Best Adapted Screenplay,Best Art Direction andBest Costume Design. It also won fiveBritish Academy Film Awards and aGolden Globe. In 1999 theBritish Film Institute placedA Room with a View 73rd on its list of thetop 100 British films.
In 1907 a young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, and her much older cousin andchaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, stay at thePensione Bertolini while on holiday inFlorence. They are disappointed that their rooms lack a view of the RiverArno as promised. At dinner they meet other English guests: theReverend Mr. Beebe; two elderly spinster sisters, the Misses Alan; romance author Eleanor Lavish; the freethinking Mr. Emerson; and his quiet, handsome son George.
Learning about Charlotte and Lucy's disappointment at not having a view of the river, Mr. Emerson and George offer to exchange rooms, though Charlotte considers the suggestion indelicate. Mr. Beebe mediates and the switch is made. While touring thePiazza della Signoria the next day, Lucy witnesses a local man being brutally stabbed and killed. She faints but George Emerson appears and comes to her aid. When Lucy has recovered, the two have a brief but unchaperoned discussion before returning to the pensione.
Later Charlotte, Lucy and the Emersons join other British tourists for a day trip to theFiesole countryside. The carriage driver canoodles with his girlfriend, sitting beside him, which upsets Reverend Eager, who insists the girlfriend get off the carriage in the middle of the countryside. Wishing to engage in gossip unsuitable for Lucy, Charlotte and Miss Lavish encourage her to go for a walk; Lucy goes looking for Mr. Beebe. The Italian driver, possibly misunderstanding Lucy's awkward Italian or possibly mischievously playingCupid, instead leads her to where George Emerson is admiring the view from a hillside. Seeing Lucy across a poppy field, he suddenly embraces and passionately kisses her. Charlotte appears and intervenes. Worried that Lucy's mother will consider her an inadequate chaperone, Charlotte swears Lucy to secrecy and cuts their trip short.
Upon returning toSurrey inEngland, Lucy says nothing to her mother about the incident and pretends to forget it. She is soon engaged to Cecil Vyse, a wealthy and socially prominent man who is cold, snobbish, and pretentious. Cecil loves Lucy, but he and his mother consider the Honeychurch family their social inferiors, which offends Mrs. Honeychurch. Lucy soon learns that Mr. Emerson is moving into Sir Harry Otway's rental cottage, with George visiting at weekends. Lucy intended the two Misses Alan to live there and is cross with Cecil on learning that through a chance meeting with the Emersons in London, Cecil recommended the cottage to them. He proclaims his motive was to annoy Sir Harry, whom Cecil considers a snob; he assumes Harry will find the Emersons “too common".
George's presence upends Lucy's life, and her suppressed feelings for him surface. Cecil, her fiancé, asks her permission to kiss her, then does so awkwardly. Lucy’s non sequitur comment that the people she met in Italy were “extraordinary” invites a comparison to the impromptu passionate kiss she received from George. Meanwhile, Lucy's brother, Freddy, becomes friends with George. Freddy invites George to play tennis at Windy Corner, the Honeychurch home, during which Cecil reads Miss Lavish's latest novel set in Italy. As Cecil mockingly reads aloud to Lucy and George, they recognize a scene as being identical to their encounter in the poppy field in Fiesole. Cecil, still reading, is oblivious when George passionately kisses Lucy in the garden. She confronts Charlotte, who admits to telling Miss Lavish about the kiss in the poppy field, which was then used in her story. Lucy orders George to leave Windy Corner and never return. He says that Cecil sees her only as a possession and will never love her for herself, as he would. Lucy seems unmoved, but soon after ends her engagement to Cecil, saying they are incompatible.
To escape the ensuing fallout, Lucy arranges to travel toGreece with the Misses Alan. George, unable to be around Lucy, arranges for his father to move to London, unaware that Lucy is no longer engaged. When Lucy calls at Mr. Beebe's home to fetch Charlotte, she is confronted by Mr. Emerson, who happens to be there. She finally realizes and admits her true feelings for George.
At the end, newlyweds George and Lucy honeymoon at the Italian pensione where they met, in the room with a view, overlooking Florence'sDuomo.
E. M. Forster began to writeA Room with a View during a trip toItaly in the winter of 1901–02 when he was twenty-two. It was the first novel he worked on; however, he put it away before returning to it a few years later. Forster finished first two other novels:Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and thenThe Longest Journey (1907).A Room with a View was finally published in 1908. Set in Italy and England,A Room with a View follows Lucy Honeychurch, a proper young Englishwoman who discovers passion while on a trip to Italy. At her return to the restrained culture of Edwardian-era England, she must choose between two opposite men: the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. The story is both a romance and a humorous critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. The novel, Forster's third, was very well received, better than his previous two, but it is considered lighter than his two best-regarded later worksHowards End (1910) andA Passage to India (1924). In Forster's own appreciation "A Room with a View, may not be his best, but may very well be his nicest".[4]
In 1946,20th Century Fox offered $25,000 for the film rights toA Room with a View, but Forster did not hold cinema in high regard and refused although the studio was willing to pay him even more.[5] Following Forster's death in 1970, the board of fellows ofKing's College, Cambridge, inherited the rights to his books.[6] However, Donald A Parry, chief executor, turned down all approaches. Ten years later, the film rights for Forster's novels became available when the film enthusiast ProfessorBernard Williams became chief executor.[7] The trustees of Forster's estate invited producerIsmail Merchant and director James Ivory to Cambridge to discuss filming Forster.[7]
The role of Lucy Honeychurch wasHelena Bonham Carter's breakthrough as a film actress.[8] She was eighteen at the time and had just finished the art-house filmLady Jane (1986).[9][10] Ivory gave her the role as he found "she was very quick, very smart, and very beautiful".[8] She fitted Forster's description of Lucy as "a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face".
Rupert Everett auditioned for the role of Cecil Vyse. He would rather have played George Emerson, but Ivory thought that he was not quite right for it. It wasJulian Sands who was cast as the male lead. Sands had gained notice as the British photographer inThe Killing Fields (1984).[8]
Daniel Day-Lewis came to the attention of Ivory through his role in the playAnother Country as the gay student Guy Bennet.[11] Given the choice of either George Emerson or Cecil Vyse, he took on the more challenging role of Cecil.[12] The role of Freddy Honeychurch, Lucy's brother, went toRupert Graves, in his film debut.[12] He had had a minor role as one of the schoolboys in the playAnother Country.[12]
Simon Callow had been Ivory's original choice for the character of Harry Hamilton-Paul, the friend of the Nawab, in the Merchant Ivory filmHeat and Dust, but had committed to a play in London's West End.[8] He had created the role of Mozart in the original London stage production ofPeter Shaffer's playAmadeus (1979) and made his film debut in a small role in thefilm adaptation.[8] InA Room with a View, he was cast as the vicar Mr. Beebe.[13]
The supporting cast included veteran performers: Five years earlier,Maggie Smith had worked in another Merchant Ivory film,Quartet.[14] With a prominent theatre career,Judi Dench had made her film debut in 1964, but she took the supporting role of Eleanor Lavish. Dench and Ivory had disagreements during the filming ofA Room with a View because, among other things, he suggested that she play her character as a Scot.[15]
The film was made on a budget of $3 million that included investment byCinecom in the U.S, and fromGoldcrest Films, theNational Film Finance Corporation, andCurzon Film Distributors in Great Britain.[16]A Room with a View was shot extensively on location inFlorence, where Merchant Ivory had thePiazza della Signoria cleared for filming.[17] Pensione Quisisana served as the Pensione Bertolini, alsoVilla di Maiano in some interiors.[18] From its decoration of the walls they asked a painter to do a series of decorative artworks calledgrotesques that were used for titles between sections of the film, like chapter headings, following chapter titles in Forster's novel.[19]
Other scenes were filmed in London and around the town ofSevenoaks in Kent where they borrowed the Kent family estate of film critic John Pym for their country scenes. Lucy's engagement party was filmed in the grounds ofEmmetts Garden.[20] Foxwold House nearChiddingstone was used for the Honeychurch house and an artificial pond was built in the forest of the property to use as theSacred Lake. Two years later, theGreat Storm of 1987 would tear through the area and destroy the gardens and almost 80 acres of the surrounding forest.[21] In London, theLinley Sambourne House inSouth Kensington was used for Cecil's house and the Estonian Legation onQueensway was used for the boarding house where the Miss Alans live.[22] In all,A Room with a View was shot in ten weeks: four in Italy and six in England.[23] The film includes a notable scene of full frontal male nudity in which George, Freddy, and Mr. Beebe go skinnydipping in a pond.[24][25][26]
The film received positive reviews from critics, holding a 100% rating onRotten Tomatoes based on 35 reviews, with aweighted average of 8.40/10. The site's consensus reads: "The hard edges of E.M Forster’s novel may be sanded off, but what we get withA Room with a View is an eminently entertaining comedy with an intellectual approach to love".[27] According toMetacritic, which sampled the opinions of 21 critics and calculated a score of 83 out of 100, the film received "universal acclaim".[28]Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, writing: "It is an intellectual film, but intellectual about emotions: It encourages us to think about how we feel, instead of simply acting on our feelings."[29]A Room With a View appeared on 61 critics' ten-best lists in 1986, making it one of the most acclaimed films of the year.[30] The February 2020 issue ofNew York Magazine listsA Room with a View as among "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars."[31]
The film made $4.4 million at the US box office in the first 12 weeks of release.[3] After six months on release, it returned a distributor’s gross of £2,026,304 in Britain. It made US $14 million from North America.[32]Goldcrest Films invested £460,000 in the film and earned £1,901,000 meaning they made a profit of £1,441,000.[33]
The film also includes music played by Lucy on the piano:
And Piano Sonata No. 8 K. 310 I. Allegro maestoso, byWolfgang Amadeus Mozart
