A Room With a View was released a few years after we were married. By the time we got our new VCR attached to the TV, it was too late for the tea-steeping pace of a Merchant Ivory movie, and I fell asleep before the end.
Since then it has been thirty-six years. A baby born during the premiere would have a) made a mess in the theater and b) grown to be a post-menopausal woman who could still not stay awake during this movie.
I have tried. I try to watch it every decade or so. Usually I find it when it’s toward the start and the only thing happening is bees buzzing in a field FOR FIVE SOLID MINUTES, or so it seems.
So, the TiVo said, “You are sleeping in regularly now, and you seem to enjoy this bustles and crumpets bullshit, so how about this,” and it recorded it as a suggestion. We have played this game before, where a movie sits in my suggestions long enough for me to say, “No, Sophie’s Choice, no, On the Basis of Sex, no, I have never watched you and it appears I am not going to watch you this time.”
This time though, I am taking a new approach. I am ingesting A Room with a View in twenty minute capsules. I get my dose of Helena Bonham Carter every few days, but only twenty minutes of her, no more. I’ve done this for a few days, and she just got kissed in a field. (It’s been so long since that movie was made that it depicts a non-consensual field kiss.)
I could be wrong, they might be lulling me in to a stupor so the drama has more impact, but I doubt there’s going to be a frantic gondola ride at the climax.