Few collaborations are so distinctive that the names of those involved come to denote a genre, rather than just a credit. A Room With a View, the first of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant's EM Forster adaptations, was shot before the term Merchant-Ivory had become an insult; watch it today and you'll blush to have ever smirked at the cliche. This is incredibly fresh and arresting film-making: moving and amusing, swooningly romantic and socially ferocious – nothing less than a full-frontal (in every way) assault on your soul.
Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) is on a Baedeker-led tour of Florence with punctilious cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith) when she encounters, at their pensione, free-thinking Mr Emerson (Denholm Elliott) and his dreamy son, George (Julian Sands). Through a series of bloody physical confrontations and, worse yet, sticky etiquette breaches, Lucy's desire for emotional freedom starts to bubble, coming to the boil when George kisses her in a cornfield. But Charlotte witnessed the snog, so Lucy is whisked back to Surrey, where she gets engaged to the horribly priggish Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis), to the polite distaste of her family, and the Rev Beebe (Simon Callow, uncharacteristically subtle). Then the Emersons reappear …
What might have been starched and talky in other hands comes out of the wash alive with spring and spirit. The botched embrace between Lucy and Cecil, and the heartbreaking moment when he, after being rejected, puts his boots back on, are once seen, never forgotten. Smith's Charlotte – so funny as a curmudgeonly drag ("The ground will do for me," she says, as cushions are assigned on a picnic, "I haven't had rheumatism for years. And if I do feel a twinge, I shall stand up") – is just tragic alone, as Lucy might well have been, had her story not had such a happy ending. The final scene, a ravishing in a room, with a view, as the bells of Florence chime out, would leave only a stone unmoved.
