Day 59: E.M. Forster's Happy Ending

Film Review: A Room With a View (2007) So it was only supposed to be another made-for-tv movie, and modern to boot. Forster and Eliot and Woolf all knew each other; their group was infamous for snobbery and so-called sophisticated world views--with that in mind, I looked for it in this adaptation. The plot features a girl on holiday to Italy with her very nervous aunt; she meets a "deep-thinking" melancholy boy who comes to life at her companionship. Lucy wanders the streets alone one day and stares up at the marbled Renaissance nudes in the square, all her Victorian England prudery giving way to curiosity and organic wonder. A smiling Italian man approaches her, clearly complimenting her innocent charms, when a man stabs him in the back--everything slows, he coughs, and blood spatters on her perfect white Victorian dress. Lucy faints. When she comes to, her world is different. A man lies dead in the square, his murderer sobbing over his body. The boy George rescues her from this awful scene, and yet tells her that they are not so different from the Italians. Forster's modernism in the film is a rejection of this snobbish prudery and gravitates toward arousing faculties, passion, and incredible emotion. Lucy's devotion to Beethoven deepens as she tries to get away from George, engaged to another man completely unlike him--until she realizes the people in her world have quashed out their own passions and desires for an empty life of politeness and social-climbing. The odd thing about this story is that despite her new perspective, despite the chick ending, despite the hopes that becoming more human will make everyone more happy, George is killed in World War I. Is Forster trying to squelch the happy ending he has unwittingly made? Or is that merely the beginning of modernism? The film was really fantastic. I suppose the dampered ending is part of life; it is impossible to be completely happy for long stretches of time, after all--but Forster does give us the hope that we can find ourselves through loving another person wholly and completely. Lucy is still alive at the end, and we see that she is still grateful for the life she chose. It is a film about emotional honesty, identity, and humanity that really resonated with me--a high recommendation to anyone remotely interested in good literature.