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All these years later, surely it's time to sweep aside the preconceptions and see the film for what it is: fresh, sophisticated, and above all, passionate. And that A Room With a View is also lovely to look at detracts neither from its comic wisdom nor its status as one of the best movies of the '80s.

Part of Merchant Ivory's gift was recognizing which masterpieces of world literature would translate well, providing material that can actually be photographed in addition to superlative prose (which can't). A Room With A View, with its clash between stiff propriety and unruly passion, was ideal, and also provided a superb showcase for some of England's greatest actors, few of whom were well known at the time.

A Room with a View is a masterful example of how to take well-regarded literary source material, render it in a manner that displays the visual markers of middlebrow sophistication, like ornamental costume design and fine-tuned "art direction," as the Oscars like to call it, and intersperse it with surface-level controversies, like three heterosexual men chasing each other around a pond with their dicks out.

The film leaves the spectator with an overwhelming impression of being entirely suffused with heart-lifting, open-air sunlight—not unlike, in this respect, some of the masterworks of Renoir or Rohmer. Yet revisiting A Room with a View, thirty years on, one is struck not only by the glorious sunlight but equally by an effervescent lightness of tone—and a sense that the film has weathered the years without, in any significant way, growing old or stale.

Without [Helena Bonham Carter], A Room with a View would have been merely a Masterpiece Theater litany of ripe character actors spouting the king's English. With her, it breathes like a newlywed on honeymoon.

The focus of virtually every scene is the snippy judgments the characters pass on their supposed inferiors; meanwhile, the director is passing his own judgments on everybody, via grotesquely distorted close-ups and coyly interposed subtitles. You're bullied into sharing Ivory's point of view—it's that or be labeled a clod.