A Room With A View

 

Beautiful music. Kiri Te Kanawa singing an aria, Chi il bel sogno di Doretta, from Puccini's opera La Rondine (The Swallow).

Julian Sands's death was all over the news feed last week. So sad. I've only seen 2 of his movies, A Room With A View and Warlock.

A Room With A View is one of my favorite movies of all time. I watched it a gazillion times since its release in 1986 or 87. I have 3 different copies. I first watched it on Betamax. Yup, Betamax which was what's available in the Philippines at the time. When we moved to Hong Kong the following year, I had to buy a VHS copy because Hong Kong didn't use Betamax and it had a different system too (PAL). After 3 years we moved to the US so I had to get another VHS copy because USA had a different system (NTSC). When DVDs arrived, of course I had to get it. Same with Sixteen Candles. The tapes of both movies are in a box somewhere in the basement.

A Room With A View is almost perfection with a superb cast. Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch - her luxuriant hair was to die for and I love her character getting peevish after playing a Beethoven piano sonata. Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse - magnificent as a snobbish aesthete but accepting in his defeat, his acting was over the top funny. I think in his own way, he truly loved Lucy. Maggie Smith - great in her role as the uptight "poor" Aunt Charlotte with her defective boiler and all. Judy Dench - as Elinor Lavish, a gossipy writer of trashy romance novels. She included the kiss in Florence in one of her novels that Cecil mockingly read to Lucy. Rupert Graves was cute as Lucy's brother Freddy. Denholm Elliot as Mr. Emerson, Simon Callow as Reverend Beebe, and of course Julian Sands as dour George Emerson.

George Emerson and Jake Ryan (of Sixteen Candles) are the best male romantic characters in a movie but are almost impossible to find in real life. LOL