‘A Room with a View’ or — Asshole Central?

Merchant/Ivory’s adaptation of E. M. Forster’s ‘A Room With a View’ (1985) tells the story of young Lucy Honeychurch who takes her libido out on unsuspecting pianos to such an extent that it is decided that she should marry and so Lucy becomes engaged to the refined, yet aloof, Cecil when everyone knows she really loves the free-spirited George.

Obviously this raises an extremely interesting question, namely — who the hell gives a flying shit?!

Jesus Christ, how on earth was this film so popular as well as being nominated for 8 Academy Awards? Was everyone in the 1980’s so terrified of impending nuclear annihilation that society collectively lost its mind and actually fell for this tedious, insufferable, fawning, class-fetishising, poshlust pish?! I mean, where to even begin?

Let’s start with the characters, all of whom are elitist, selfish bell-ends who do nothing more than swan about in a self-contained world where the notion of doing any form of actual work is an alien concept and the only real worry is where they’re going on holiday next and whether or not their room will have a sodding view. And I’m meant to sympathise with these loathsome idiots?

This is why Lucy’s central dilemma is so “who gives a toss?” because she either has to choose between Cecil (an asshole) or George (an asshole, just of a different variety). This renders ‘A Room With a View’ down to nothing more than wondering which asshole Lucy’s going to end up with in a film already stuffed with assholes.

Think of it this way — imagine this movie transposed to contemporary Britain instead of an idealised 1908. Every single audience member sitting in the cinema would be looking at these wealthy, privileged, entitled nightmares up on screen and immediately be demanding their heads on a spike! Yeah, they don’t all look quite so romantic now, do they?

Then there’s James Ivory’s direction which is so profoundly pedestrian I’m amazed it doesn’t come with its own set of Belisha beacons. Sure, the costumes and scenery are all rather pretty but the actual use of the camera is so severely soporific that sitting through this movie is like being water-boarded with Horlicks. Where’s the probing, the analysing, the digging underneath to anything real other than portraying a vacuous surface?

There’s a specific reason why the scene where the men go bathing naked sticks in the mind and it’s not because you get to see their willies but because it’s the only sequence in the entire film with any movement, any motion and, more importantly, any vital urge with the rest of the film being so chintzily inert it’s like spending the evening with a pair of sentient net curtains. It wasn’t until an hour after the movie had finished I realised the film was about passion and lust, something that had completely passed me by because Ivory’s direction has all the sexual thrust of a digestive biscuit. And elsewhere you can tell when he’s run out of anything interesting to do with the camera because he simply slathers the film in enough Puccini to make an Italian puke.

‘A Room with a View’ represents everything that made British prestige cinema in the 1980’s so unbearably dull (and British cinema in the 80’s could be excruciatingly dull. Don’t believe me? Treat yourself to a double-bill of ‘Gandhi’ and ‘Chariots of Fire’ tonight. It’ll make you want to blow your brains out). Still, this film was hugely popular, made a load of money (we all have an inner snob that’s easily suckered in by a splash of ‘class’) and I’m fully aware that Lucy and her friends have many fervent admirers. Personally speaking, I wanted to chuck a petrol-bomb at the entire fucking lot of them.