A Room with a View

Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman travelling in Italy with her older chaperone Charlotte Bartlett, finds her holiday transformed by an unexpected encounter. When the two women arrive at their Florentine guesthouse without the promised view, two fellow British guests, the unconventional Mr. Emerson and his son George, offer to exchange rooms. The acquaintance that follows unsettles Lucy's carefully guarded world, and back in England she must weigh her feelings against the respectable marriage being arranged for her.

James Ivory directed the film, the fifth of eleven features listed from his career, following The Europeans, Quartet, Heat and Dust, and coming before Maurice, Howards End and The Remains of the Day. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the screenplay and Ismail Merchant produced, continuing the trio's long collaboration. Helena Bonham Carter plays Lucy, with Julian Sands as George Emerson, Maggie Smith as Charlotte, Denholm Elliott as Mr. Emerson, Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse and Simon Callow as the Reverend Mr. Beebe. The film is based on E. M. Forster's novel.

Made for about 3 million dollars and released in March 1986, the film took roughly 21 million dollars worldwide, a strong return on its budget and a sign of wide audience interest in this period literary adaptation. On IMDb it holds a critics' rating of 8.4 from 35 reviews, notably higher than its TMDB audience score of 6.9 from more than 860 votes.