Laura Barton 

Why I’d like to be … Julian Sands in A Room With a View

Continuing our series in which writers reveal the movie characters they want to emulate, Laura Barton revives her tomboy teen admiration for George Emerson in the 1985 adaptation of EM Forster's novel of Edwardian repression
  
  

Julian Sands and Helena Bonham Carter in A Room With a View
Julian Sands and Helena Boham Carter in A Room With a View: 'Breathtaking kisses in barley fields.' Photograph: Moviestore Collection Photograph: Moviestore Collection

I was perhaps 12 the first time I saw A Room With a View, Merchant Ivory's sumptuous adaptation of EM Forster's novel, which explored themes of passion and repression in the Edwardian era, set against the backdrops of Italy and England.

There were Baedekers and mackintosh squares, cornflowers, carriages, breathtaking kisses in barley fields. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sang Puccini's O Mio Babbino Caro; Denholm Elliott read Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh; a swarthy Italian was stabbed to death in the Piazza della Signoria, his bloodied face washed clean in the Fountain of Neptune.

For a tomboy on the cusp of adolescence, it was a perplexing film. I knew that I was expected to identify with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Lucy Honeychurch, the exquisitely beautiful heroine with the pouty mouth who wears such embroidered finery and plays Beethoven till it makes her peevish.

But I recall on that first viewing (and indeed subsequent viewings too) a greater aspiration towards Julian Sands as George Emerson, a young man who works on the railways and reads Nietzsche on the side, who is earnest in his pursuit of truth and beauty, but also given to bursts of uncontained amusement.


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There was lust in there, certainly — how not to blush before a man so startlingly handsome and so given to passionate kissing amid Italian fields? But there was another kind of desire in me, too.

Part of it lay in his approach to life, in his embracing of the "eternal 'Yes'" — in his fondness for painting Thoreau quotations on wardrobe doors and question marks on picture frames, as well as for climbing up into the trees and shouting at the sky: "BEAUTY! JOY!" until he falls from the branches.

But it lay in his easy physicality too. He was forever climbing trees, or walking back to the Pensione Bertolini in the rain. He rode a bicycle with such confident pleasure, he leapt over tennis nets, and in one particularly memorable scene he joined Lucy's brother Freddy and the family vicar Mr Beebe as they cavorted joyously, nakedly in a lake on a hot day.

To borrow the words of Walt Whitman, speaking of another Emerson entirely: "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil." With some delight I realised that I wanted to be George Emerson. How wonderful it would be to ride a bicycle so assuredly! How splendid to bathe in a Surrey lake so gladly and without care! How thrilling it would be to live openly, without reservation or hesitation!

Much of Forster's novel was concerned with the matter of "inside" and "outside" — Lucy has led a buttoned-up existence, her horizons, her education, her person restricted by the fact that she is female and upper-class; George has been raised in unconventional fashion, without religion, with a reverence for nature and the world, for free-thinking and sensuality. The central question is whether Miss Honeychurch could ever be persuaded to reject the confines of her social standing and her gender, and to live as passionately she plays the piano — to leave the room, in effect, and step into the view.


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Watching this film on the edge of my teenage years, on the brink of womanhood, I felt very keenly the looming restrictions ahead: the pressure to conform, the necessity of behaving as a girl is supposed to behave. And it seemed to instil in me a kind of resolution: I would sooner be an Emerson than a Honeychurch, I would rather be a George than a Lucy.

There is a moment in the film where Sands leans against a doorframe. He is wearing striped braces and has the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, while around him sit boxes of books. Freddy invites him to "come and have a bathe", and away they head to the lake, George pushing off from the lintel and out into the summer's day, moving effortlessly from inside to outside.

It has remained in my mind ever since as an image of consummate masculinity. Women don't get to lean against doorframes like that — never mind splash about naked in lakes. At least not without people casting tiresome aspersions. So whenever I do something that feels to me mildly liberating, whenever I feel I am rebelling against the restrictions of being female, I think of it as my George Emerson moment, me pushing off from the doorframe, out from the room and into the view.

 

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