A Room with a View

1907. Lucy, a young Englishwoman from a good family, chaperoned by her unmarried cousin Charlotte, stays in Florence in a room that does not have the view she was promised over the Arno. There she meets a compatriot, the anti-conformist George, who upturns her life. Upon her return to England, Lucy finds the strength to break her engagement with the nobleman Cecil. She returns to Florence, this time to a room with a view. This is one of Forster’s early works […] It is therefore rather obvious that the portrait painted by A Room with a View is more schematic. Ivory takes this linearity and has fun with it, sketching out an actual “menagerie” of Anglo-Saxon eccentricity, banality, naïveté, modesty and idealism. […] Certainly A Room with a View is the most Anglo-Saxon of Ivory’s films, though he is able to win back his own view as an outsider with enough distance to observe the constituent idiosyncrasies of a people and its culture. (Emanuela Martini, “Cineforum” n.262, March 1987). My favourite character in A Room with a View is George Emerson […] George does not have many big scenes, but his function is clear: He is the source of passion in a society that is otherwise tightly bound up in convention, timidity and dryness. (R. Ebert, 4 April 1986) Ivory puts together an impeccable package, accurate in its details, fluid and flowing as a story. [...] The director is supported in his
effort by highly professional actors such as Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter at her debut, Julian Sands and Daniel Day-Lewis before he achieved fame (C. Bragaglia, in “Nuovo dizionario universale del cinema”, edited by F. Di Giammatteo, Editori Riuniti, 1994).