Karly
My birthday is on Wednesday and, since Wednesday is not actually my posting day, I’ve decided to use this week’s post for something that is both slightly self-indulgent and extremely on brand: talking about one of my favourite films. There are more topical things I could be writing about, probably, but it’s my birthday week and I make the editorial calendar, so you’re getting A Room with a View.
Calling any film adaptation perfect is asking for trouble. There will always be a missing scene, a compressed character, a line somebody considers essential, a costume button fastened according to the wrong year or a reader who has spent thirty years furious that an actor’s hair is the wrong colour. Adaptation invites complaint because every reader arrives carrying a private version of the book, and cinema has the unfortunate task of putting one version in front of everybody at once.
I have no complaints about A Room with a View. This is an absurd thing for me to say. E. M. Forster’s novel contains Lucy Honeychurch, a character I have loved for years with enough intensity that I have repeatedly announced I am Lucy and intend to give her name to a hypothetical future daughter, so I should be an adaptation’s most irritating possible audience. I should have notes. I should have grievances. I should be able to point accusingly at the screen and explain that Forster would never. Instead, James Ivory’s film gives me Florence, Beethoven, violets, Cecil’s pince-nez, Charlotte Bartlett worrying herself into an early grave, George Emerson being George Emerson and Helena Bonham Carter looking exactly as though Lucy Honeychurch has somehow escaped from the page, and every time I watch it I arrive at the same deeply unhelpful critical conclusion: yes. Correct. Carry on.
Released in 1985, directed by James Ivory, produced by Ismail Merchant and adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A Room with a View belongs to that category of literary adaptation which has become so culturally definitive that it can become difficult to separate the images of the film from the images produced by reading the book. Jhabvala’s screenplay even retains Forster’s chapter-title structure, allowing the film to announce itself with the same slightly mischievous literary formality as the novel, while the story moves between Florence and England with remarkable confidence. The film was eventually awarded the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, alongside wins for its costume and production design, which feels appropriate for an adaptation where words, clothes, rooms, landscapes and social behaviour are all doing narrative work at once.
Its perfection comes from understanding Forster well enough to know what must survive the journey. The irony survives, the comedy survives, the embarrassment survives, the suffocating choreography of English respectability survives, and underneath all of it remains the dangerous possibility that a person might look beyond the life arranged for her and discover that she wants something else. The film allows all of those things to coexist without flattening the story into a straightforward romance about a young woman choosing between two men, because George and Cecil only make sense as choices once we understand the much larger choice Lucy is struggling to make about herself.
Florence therefore has an enormous amount of work to do. Forster sends Lucy abroad and immediately begins disturbing the boundaries of the world she understands, starting with the apparently catastrophic discovery that she and Charlotte have been given rooms without views. The film understands the joke and the metaphor without underlining either of them. Florence is light, noise, colour, art, strangers, streets, violence, beauty and behaviour Lucy has no reliable method of organising, while Charlotte trails behind trying desperately to apply English rules to a city that has no particular interest in obeying them.
The contrast becomes even more satisfying once Lucy returns to England. Windy Corner is beautiful, green and comfortable, and the film wisely resists making conventionality visually ugly. Lucy isn’t choosing between a miserable grey prison and a Technicolor fantasy of liberation. England is home. It contains her family, her history, her piano, Freddy charging around the countryside and a life she genuinely understands, which makes the restrictions operating within it much more interesting. A comfortable world can still become too small for the person living inside it.
This is where the production design and cinematography become part of the adaptation rather than merely its decoration. A novel called A Room with a View inevitably invites us to think about looking, framing and the relationship between interior spaces and everything beyond them, and cinema can make those ideas literal without requiring anyone to explain them. Windows frame landscapes, rooms contain people, Florence opens outward and English drawing rooms organise bodies according to social relationships. Tony Pierce-Roberts’s cinematography gives the landscapes enough beauty to make their emotional significance instinctive, while the film keeps returning us to interiors where manners determine how much space a person is allowed to occupy. Merchant Ivory’s own account of the production emphasises the Florentine locations and Tuscan landscape as central elements of the film, alongside the English social world to which Lucy returns.
Then there is Lucy herself, which is where my capacity for critical distance deteriorates completely. Helena Bonham Carter was extraordinarily young when she played her, and that youth matters because Lucy is supposed to exist on the uncomfortable border between being managed and becoming capable of managing herself. She watches people. She hesitates. She can look terribly certain while having absolutely no idea what she is doing. Her face can register the beginning of a thought before Lucy herself appears willing to acknowledge it, which gives the film access to an interiority that prose can simply narrate.
Bonham Carter also understands something essential about Lucy’s awkwardness. Lucy isn’t a polished proto-feminist who has wandered accidentally into the wrong century, waiting for an enlightened audience to applaud her. She can be conventional, frightened, snobbish, dishonest, passionate and deeply susceptible to the expectations of other people, sometimes within the same afternoon. Her development depends upon all those contradictions remaining visible, because freedom would mean very little if Lucy had secretly possessed perfect self-knowledge from the opening scene.
Her piano playing becomes especially important because the film can allow music to occupy the space Forster gives to descriptions of Lucy’s musical personality. When she plays, the cautious young woman we have been watching acquires force. The performance can communicate before Lucy has developed the courage to do so herself, and the soundtrack allows that difference to be experienced rather than explained. The film’s use of music, including Puccini sung by Kiri Te Kanawa alongside Richard Robbins’s score, contributes to a world where emotion is often most legible when nobody is attempting to discuss it politely.
Maggie Smith’s Charlotte Bartlett may be an even more impressive act of translation. Charlotte could very easily become the chaperone-shaped obstacle standing between Lucy and happiness, a walking collection of Edwardian inhibitions whose primary function is to say no, look scandalised and remove young women from fields containing attractive men. Smith gives her considerably more humanity. Charlotte is exhausting because Charlotte herself appears exhausted by the enormous responsibility of anticipating every possible impropriety before it occurs, and her vigilance can be ridiculous, manipulative, affectionate and strangely sad at the same time.
The comedy matters enormously here. Forster is funny, and any adaptation that treated A Room with a View as a solemn tale of female repression would lose one of the things that makes the novel breathe. English propriety in Forster can be genuinely restrictive while also being completely absurd, and Ivory allows both truths to occupy the same scene. Charlotte can infuriate Lucy while making us laugh. Mr Eager can take himself with a seriousness the film does not share. Eleanor Lavish can sweep through Florence believing herself magnificently unconventional while possessing her own impressive collection of assumptions. Judi Dench, naturally, has an excellent time with this.
The supporting cast is almost indecently good. Denholm Elliott gives Mr Emerson the warmth and oddness necessary for a man whose directness repeatedly violates the social instincts of everyone around him. Simon Callow’s Mr Beebe observes Lucy with the mixture of affection, curiosity and clerical amusement the character requires. Rosemary Leach gives Mrs Honeychurch the wonderful solidity of someone who may lack Cecil’s cultural pretensions while frequently possessing considerably better instincts, and Rupert Graves’s Freddy brings precisely the physical, uncomplicated energy needed in a story where everyone else spends so much time thinking themselves into corners. The principal cast also included Judi Dench as Eleanor Lavish, Maggie Smith as Charlotte, Elliott as Mr Emerson, Callow as Mr Beebe, Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil, Julian Sands as George and Bonham Carter as Lucy, an ensemble that now reads almost comically well on paper and works even better together.
Then Daniel Day-Lewis walks in as Cecil Vyse and somehow makes the entire enterprise even better.
Cecil is one of the reasons I resist adaptations that turn romantic stories into a crude competition between Obviously Correct Man and Obviously Incorrect Man. Cecil is absolutely wrong for Lucy, and the film knows this from approximately the moment he materialises, yet he has to remain comprehensible as someone Lucy could choose. He represents sophistication, culture and distance from the provincial world she has begun to find limiting. He has books and opinions and London, and he can initially look like a door leading somewhere larger.
Day-Lewis plays him with such extraordinary physical precision that Cecil seems incapable of encountering the natural world without experiencing it as a personal inconvenience. His clothes, posture, voice and pince-nez all belong to the same man. The performance is extremely funny, although Cecil never becomes disposable. His eventual conversation with Lucy retains the dignity necessary for the scene to matter, and his response to the end of their engagement reminds us that being wrong for somebody does not require being incapable of reflection.
Julian Sands has the opposite challenge with George. George can become unbearably romantic in the wrong hands because the material provides Florence, fields, kisses, rebellion and an emotionally repressed heroine who needs liberating, all the ingredients required to produce a man who appears to have been manufactured specifically for literary quotation accounts. Sands keeps something strange in him. George is inward, melancholy, abrupt and occasionally difficult to read, which preserves the sense that Lucy is encountering a person rather than an answer supplied by the narrative.
The chemistry works because the film understands restraint. Lucy and George don’t need endless conversations explaining their attraction, and the camera doesn’t need to convert every encounter into a declaration. Physical distance can become meaningful. A look can do the work of several sentences. A landscape can alter the emotional scale of a scene, and music can arrive where dialogue would make everything smaller. Cinema has resources Forster didn’t, and the film trusts them.
This becomes particularly obvious in the famous kiss among the violets. The scene has become one of the defining images of the adaptation, and its effectiveness comes partly from how little psychological annotation cinema requires. Forster can guide us through narrative voice, irony and Lucy’s confusion; Ivory can place Lucy in a landscape, allow George to cross it and let the interruption of Charlotte’s arrival restore the social world with almost comic brutality. The movement from freedom to surveillance happens before anybody needs to formulate a theory about it.
That balance between sensuality and comedy may be the film’s greatest achievement. A Room with a View contains desire everywhere, although desire keeps colliding with English embarrassment. People kiss and panic. Bodies exist inconveniently. Freddy, George and Mr Beebe go swimming with an enthusiasm that temporarily annihilates social decorum, only for civilisation to wander back into view at precisely the wrong moment. The film allows physical freedom to become joyous and ridiculous at once, which feels entirely appropriate for a story suspicious of people who take social rules, and sometimes themselves, too seriously.
The Sacred Lake scene is a perfect example of something an adaptation can make more immediate through bodies. The men run, splash, shout and abandon the elaborate systems through which the rest of the film organises respectable behaviour, and the comedy arrives when that freedom crashes into the world of clothes, manners and unexpected witnesses. It would be easy to treat the scene as charming comic relief. Within the larger structure, it belongs to the film’s repeated fascination with what people become when social observation briefly disappears.
Observation matters everywhere in A Room with a View. People watch one another, interpret one another and worry about being watched, while Lucy spends much of the story attempting to work out which version of herself she is performing for whom. Film is particularly well equipped for this because watching is the condition of cinema itself. We become another set of eyes following Lucy, except Ivory frequently allows us to see the absurdity of the rules surrounding her before she does.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplay deserves enormous credit for preserving the novel’s intelligence without turning the film into a succession of illustrated quotations. The production history itself suggests an active process of adaptation rather than mechanical transcription: the surviving shooting script is heavily annotated by Ivory, and records show the screenplay as Jhabvala’s adaptation of Forster’s novel. The finished film consequently feels literary without becoming trapped by literariness. It knows when words are indispensable and when an image can take over.
It also understands what can disappear. The film does make changes and omissions, including simplifying parts of Mr Emerson’s history and shortening the novel’s final material surrounding Charlotte’s possible role in bringing Lucy and George together. The broad shape of the ending remains, with Lucy and George returning to the room at the Pensione Bertolini, while some of Forster’s final ambiguity around Charlotte is left behind. I should, according to the rules of devoted-reader behaviour, be annoyed. I’m not.
That may be the clearest explanation I can offer for calling the adaptation perfect. Perfection in adaptation cannot sensibly require the preservation of every incident, line and implication, because film has its own architecture and a finite running time. The more useful test concerns proportion. Remove something and the story should retain its balance; compress something and its function should survive somewhere else; alter something and the new version should understand what the original element was accomplishing before deciding how cinema can accomplish it differently.
A Room with a View repeatedly passes that test for me. Its Florence feels like Forster’s Florence because it destabilises Lucy. Its England feels like Forster’s England because beauty and suffocation are allowed to coexist. Cecil remains ridiculous, intelligent and wrong. Charlotte remains infuriating, funny and more complicated than Lucy initially understands. George retains enough strangeness to avoid becoming a fantasy solution to Lucy’s problems. Lucy herself remains unfinished until very nearly the end.
Even the film’s beauty serves the argument. Period adaptations can sometimes become victims of their own production values, so exquisitely dressed and photographed that every frame starts resembling an advertisement for the past. Here, beauty has dramatic purpose. Italy seduces, England comforts, clothes constrain and reveal, rooms organise social relationships, views suggest possibilities, and the physical world keeps presenting Lucy with evidence that life is larger than the categories she has inherited. The film won Academy Awards for costume design and art direction as well as adapted screenplay, and those achievements belong together more naturally than the separate categories might suggest.
There is also something wonderfully confident about the film’s willingness to remain funny while looking this beautiful. Prestige literary adaptations can become terribly aware of their own prestige, particularly when they involve canonical English novelists, magnificent houses and actors speaking in exquisitely controlled vowels. A Room with a View has all the ingredients required for unbearable reverence and uses several of them to make Cecil fall about awkwardly instead.
Perhaps this is why the film has become inseparable from the novel in my imagination. When I think of Lucy, Helena Bonham Carter is there. When I think of Cecil, Daniel Day-Lewis has already put on the pince-nez. Maggie Smith has occupied Charlotte so completely that attempting to evict her seems pointless, while Julian Sands belongs somewhere permanently between Florence, Windy Corner and the particular melancholy George carries around with him. The adaptation gave physical form to characters I already loved without making them feel smaller once they became visible.
That is an extraordinarily difficult thing for a film to accomplish. Reading allows characters to remain partially ours, assembled from Forster’s descriptions and whatever our imaginations contribute, while casting makes a series of irreversible decisions about faces, voices, bodies and gestures. Every one of those decisions has the potential to collide with the reader’s private version. Somehow, here, the collision feels more like recognition.
I have spent enough time loving A Room with a View to know that objectivity left the building several paragraphs ago, although perhaps objectivity would be a strange standard for an essay about adaptation in the first place. The private version matters. We judge adaptations partly by scholarship and craft, partly by what survives from the source, and partly by the much less respectable sensation of watching somebody else’s interpretation of a beloved book and thinking, with increasing astonishment, that they saw it too.
Ivory, Merchant and Jhabvala saw it. Bonham Carter saw Lucy, Smith saw Charlotte, Day-Lewis saw Cecil, Sands saw George, Elliott saw Mr Emerson, and the film around them saw that Forster’s story could be romantic without becoming sentimental, beautiful without becoming decorative, literary without becoming embalmed and funny without diminishing the seriousness of Lucy’s struggle to understand her own life.
So yes, I am willing to make the irresponsible declaration. James Ivory’s A Room with a View is a perfect adaptation, and after nearly two hours of Florence, Surrey, Puccini, Beethoven, violets, lies, kisses, pince-nez, naked swimming and some of the finest deployment of English social embarrassment ever committed to film, I remain incapable of producing the criticism expected of me.
Ten out of ten, no notes. I’ll be in the room with the view.
