BIFF25: A Room With A View PG

A Room With a View captured the attention of the world upon its release, bringing the novel by E.M. Forster to dazzling life in the Florentine countryside and in the well-appointed homes of the English Edwardian upper classes. A comedy of manners with a quick wit and impeccable comic timing, A Room With A View is also a portrait of the quiet solitude that lies beneath Forster's characters, and of the need for human connection in a world of rigid convention. The young Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch (played by Helena Bonham Carter), arrives in Florence on a Baedecker-style grand tour with her aunt Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). Through a series of events involving English expatriates Miss Eleanor Lavish, an unflappable novelist (Judi Dench), and the Emersons, a free-thinking father and son (played by Denholm Elliot and Julian, Lucy's life is changed forever under a loggia in Florence and in the Tuscan countryside. Ivory's delicate and playful direction spirits us from an adventure in the back alleys of Florence, lost with Dench and Smith, to the lace-parasolled rigidity of English lawn parties.