A Room with a View

Merchant-Ivory's A Room with a View (1986) is probably as "tasteful" as movies get. When its Renaissance illustrations and Florentine backdrop and Puccini on the soundtrack first broke through the Hollywood machine, louder and more starved for art than ever, it must have seemed like a godsend. Yet it can easily be shunted aside as drawing-room porn, a Masterpiece Theater afterbirth awash with "culture," but, in sum, only as challenging as Beverly Hills Cop or Top Gun. But I still found it marvelously entertaining, and here, I think, is why -- apart from such obvious factors as its wonderful cast, with wonderful elocution, in beautifully refined settings. The E. M. Forrester novel on which it was based was written in 1908, when Victorian mores were still in tact and the dark clouds of World Wars were still beyond the horizon. What was once probably considered a satire can now be seen as a straight document about exceptionally straight times; and since the strictures that keep Lucy Honeychurch from admitting her love to George Emerson are so unbelievably anachronistic, her problems seem clear-cut and simple to the point of not being problems at all. This world is both weightless and wealthy: Lucy's distress can be served up at tea or during a game of tennis on a regal estate or on an impromptu trip to Italy. And it really can be her only concern, since nobody has to work -- so it seems as if she has no concerns at all. In short, Edwardian England seems like a sort of idyll, unsullied even by seriously sexual thoughts -- all that Lucy and George do is a three-second kiss. The rest is all talk, and not even the capital-R Romance talk of Dench's novelist, because Lucy's too cool-headed. This is life on constant holiday, when it looked like happy days were there to stay.