MOVIE REVIEW : AN AIRY, DELIGHTFUL ‘VIEW’

During dinner at the pensione in Florence where the young, full-lipped, spirited Lucy Honeychurch is visiting, corseted in propriety by the presence of her maiden cousin Charlotte Bartlett, a message is sent--for Lucy’s eyes alone. Unconventional George Emerson, a fellow Englishman about her age and her equal in glowing handsomeness, has spelled out on his plate an enormous question mark in peas and potatoes.

Don’t be mistaken. This is no delightfully ingenious pickup. It is 1907, after all; and George is wrestling with nothing less than Life’s Great Question, the everlasting Why.

So begins the airy, delectable Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala adaptation of E.M. Forster’s thoughtful romance “A Room With a View� (Plitt Century Plaza), his third and most beckoningly readable novel, which has been made into a virtually irresistible film.

Lucy (Helena Bonham-Carter) is the silken center of it all. Gloweringly pretty, with thickets of hair and a well-placed, though not aristocratic country family, she seems deceptively demure, a proper flower of Edwardian England. But let her sit at the piano to rip into some of the Beethoven sonatas and something astonishing emerges.

To quote her admiring pastor, the bicycling Mr. Beebe (Simon Callow), “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.�

“A Room With a View� charts that emergence, and Mr. Beebe is absolutely right.

The story begins in Florence, where sun and passion, sudden love and sudden violence are understood; then moves back to England and the civility of Surrey, where even the existence of such elements is politely but firmly denied. (One of Forster’s points, exactly.)

In the square at Santa Croce, Lucy and the questioning George (Julian Sands, the blond photographer of “The Killing Fields�) are witnesses to a sudden, bloody and random act of violence (staged so that all those elements act upon us as vividly as they do on the characters.) It’s a galvanic moment, and George recognizes it. He knows with certainty for the first time that given a choice between life and death, he will now choose life. And Lucy.

Lucy, however, is still caught up in propriety and British denial. And the very openness of George’s ardor, as well as his working-class lineaments, terrifies her. She flees back home, and sets about lying to everyone--so that appearances might continue to be glassily correct--about her feelings. Most of all to herself. And she takes a fiance, Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day Lewis, gotten up to look almost exactly like Richard Haydn’s Prof. Carp), an insufferable, priggish upper-class lover of the arts, in pince-nez, a center part and three-inch collars so starched you wait for him to cut his throat on them.

Given reasonably good sense, we may suspect we know how this will work itself out, yet the film makers have done the predictable with such good humor, such wit, elegance and ardor and in such sumptuous locales, that you want the film prolonged, not ended.

This hand-polished cast has everything to do with it. As Charlotte Bartlett, forever known as Poor Charlotte, we have Maggie Smith, a veritable study in genteel self-denial. (“The ground will do for me,� she says nobly ruining an outing. “I haven’t had rheumatism in years.�) As George’s marvelous father, Denholm Elliott can almost bring tears to the eyes with his unstinting love for (and understanding of) his son.

Both Simon Callow’s robust, life-affirming (skinny-dipping) Reverend and Rosemary Leach’s sagacious Mrs. Honeychurch are memorable, as are Fabia Drake and Joan Henley as the lively and adventurous Misses Alans of the pensione . And as the two rivals for Lucy’s hand, Julian Sands conveys George’s headlong passion for life with intelligence and a handsomeness that seems somehow to refract light with a special intensity, while Daniel Day Lewis in one quiet scene turns our dislike for Cecil into compassion. (It’s Lewis’ performance that provides the greatest shock, after seeing his punker in “My Beautiful Laundrette.�)

Helena Bonham Carter is perhaps the only quibble. She certainly has attitude to burn, and a really truculent pout, but she has no resources to match her fellow cast members’ classical training. She strides about in those exquisite dresses as though she couldn’t wait to get into a decent pair of jeans, and her attack on her lines is sometimes flat. On the other hand, you certainly believe her as a lady who can dash off electrifying Beethoven and Schumann, and watching her wrestling unabashedly with her young brother (Rupert Graves), you could see her as one of E. Nesbit’s spirited heroines of the period. So perhaps the odd combinations work. Perhaps.

This is the 25th year of collaboration for producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and “A Room With A View� may be their first unequivocal commercial success. For a $3-million budget, they have worked miracles, down to the tiniest detail, such as the watercolored Florentine designs in the title cards, or up to such major ones as the shimmeringly fine photography, production design, costuming and music. A certain studied pace has dogged some of their more reverent productions, but it’s gone here. In its place is a contagious sureness, which makes “A Room With a View� the only way to travel--glorious first class.

‘A ROOM WITH A VIEW’

A Cinecom International Release. Producer Ismail Merchant. Director James Ivory. Screenplay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the novel by E.M. Forster. Camera Tony Pierce-Roberts. Music Richard Robbins. Editor Humphrey Dixon. Costumes Jenny Beavan, John Bright. Production design (Italy) Gianni Quaranta; (UK) Brian Ackland-Snow. Sound Ray Beckett. With Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter, Denholm Elliott, Julian Sands, Daniel Day Lewis, Simon Callow, Judi Dench, Rosemary Leach, Rupert Graves, Fabia Drake, Joan Henley, Maria Britneva.

Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes.

Times rated: Mature (brief nudity).