Note to self: Do not travel back in time to the 20th century. Or to be more accurate, to early 20th-century England. We've been conditioned to think it was all hot scones and tennis on the lawn, but after a closer viewing of historical facts I have learned that only a certain segment of the populace could enjoy such privileges. And even they had problems.
Reopening windows onto these problems are two films from the 1980s, digitally remastered to 21st-century standards. And each offers thoughts to munch on that are way more substantial than afternoon tea.
"A Room With a View" (1985) was one of the first batch of Merchant Ivory Productions films to reach Japan, and many women's fashion magazines swooned over the elegant clothes, aristocratic lifestyle and the rarefied, English-rose beauty of lead actress Helena Bonham Carter. She plays Lucy Honeychurch, the sheltered, proper daughter of a typical Edwardian-era middle-class family in Surrey. But under the prim and proper facade, Lucy harbors a passion she herself hardly knows about. When she plays the piano for her parents' prim and proper guests, this passion surfaces and gives everyone a good jolt.