When I first envisioned the Audient Bridesmaids series, I imagined myself building up a head of steam on the project and occasionally rattling off a couple in a row. I did expect there also to be droughts, which is why this is periodic series rather than committed to some regular time interval. But I figured I'd still make steady progress on it.
Well, before now, the closest two posts in the series were the four months between viewings of My Left Foot and I'm Still Here -- an old bridesmaid and a new bridesmaid -- last year between March and July. There was a similar gap in late 2022 and early 2023. If you take those two out, these have never come any closer than seven months apart.
I guess I must be getting serious now, because I just posted one of these 11 days ago when I saw Hope and Glory. And now I'm back with the unseen best picture nominee before that, James Ivory's A Room with a View, which I'll call from 1986 because it was nominated alongside the other 1986 nominees, even though many sites list its release year as 1985.
Watching A Room with a View also enabled me to confront a childhood fear, which sounds like a strange thing to say about a movie that in almost every respect is a very light period romantic comedy. Considering this childhood fear, that certainly isn't how I would have pegged the movie.
The phrase "childhood fear" is a little misleading. It's not like I was afraid of A Room with a View the way some children are afraid of the dark or of a monster under the bed. But I did have a traumatic experience of sorts with the movie, one that has stuck with me all these years later.
It occurred on an airplane. I'm guessing it was the summer of 1987, because that's consistent with when this movie might have appeared on an airplane. My family would have been going on a trip to the Rocky Mountains. However, it's possible it was a year earlier than that, when my family did our summer trip to the UK -- which would make a bit more sense because a) the movie is set in the UK, and b) that trip would have been only about three months after the film's theatrical release. Whichever year it was, it was almost 40 years ago.
I hadn't paid to get headphones for this movie -- which I don't think my parents would have done even with a movie that was tailored to a 12- or 13-year-old -- but that didn't mean I was immune to seeing its images. And I clearly remember getting up from my seat to go to the bathroom and seeing this:
I think I might have literally stumbled backward.
Seeing the context that led up to this -- a brief fight in a Florence square that otherwise has nothing to do with the story, with minimal impact on the characters -- might have made it less shocking. But it was first laying my eyes on the screen and seeing this soon-to-be-dead man covered in blood, and eyes wild with the fear of approaching death, or maybe already dead -- well, it was a lot for preteen me to handle.
I don't think I had nightmares about it or anything, but it did always surround A Room with a View with a certain fascination on my part.
As I said, this ends up being a complete anomaly within what amounts to one of the most whimsical Merchant-Ivory movies of this period -- or any period. And I enjoyed all of it quite a bit.
There isn't a huge amount to the plot. It's basically a chamber piece set across two settings, Florence and England, in which Helena Bonham Carter's character tries to forget her brief infatuation with Julian Sands' character, while entertaining a more practical engagement with Daniel Day-Lewis' character, in the first decade of the 20th century. Incidentally, this is the youngest I would have ever seen Day-Lewis on screen. This performance wasn't enough to get him Oscar nominated -- the nominations in this movie went to Denholm Elliott and Maggie Smith -- but he does play quite the clueless prig. And he'd win his first Oscar only three years later, in the aforementioned My Left Foot.
Although I enjoyed the story, which went by for me on a cushion of delight, it was perhaps the performers that I enjoyed most here. I didn't anticipate how many names I might know in this film. There were the character actors from my personal favorites, like Elliott (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Simon Callow (Four Weddings and a Funeral). There were the dames, one of whom we've lost (Smith) and one of whom is still with us (Judi Dench). There was poor Julian Sands, lost on that hiking trip. There's of course Bonham-Carter in the earliest of the two types of film for which she would become known (Merchant-Ivory films and Tim Burton films). And then any film with Day-Lewis is worth a watch.
I must admit, I didn't know Merchant and Ivory had such senses of humor, though of course credit there should probably go to their frequent collaborator, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It's a really funny film and the actors are on board for it. She also earned an Oscar nomination for this script.
I also didn't realize how few quintessential Merchant-Ivory films there actually are. This one is probably the most quintessential. They were such a known pairing at the time that it was almost as if they were a genre unto themselves. But really the only other significant M-I films from around this same time were The Bostonians (1984), Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), Howards End (1992) and Remains of the Day (1993). Could there have been so few? Their producer-director collaboration featured a lot more movies than just these, of course, but then you get into a bunch of pretty obscure titles both before and after, films that were not responsible for whatever time they had in our zeitgeist. I guess they had a strong imperial period but then left the center of the culture.
Fun fact: James Ivory is still alive! He's 97. Merchant, though, has been gone for 20 years now.
Don't expect another post like this in another 11 days, but when I do get to the next movie in this series, it will be Prizzi's Honor, the John Huston film from 1985.
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