The late Julian Sands had a long and active career. But I’m not alone, at the very mention of his name, in being brought back, with melancholy and reverie, to one particular work: the Merchant Ivory adaptation of EM Forster’s A Room With a View. The film is what brought Sands, and his co-star Helena Bonham Carter, their first fame; the latter was just 18 when she made it. It is adored by many because it is a perfectly made, beautifully acted and pitch-perfect thing altogether, all irradiated by enough of Forster’s irony to spare it the fate of over-earnestness. But more than that, it is adored because – especially if you first saw it, like me, as a teenager – it is the sweetest and most ardent evocation of what we all grapple with as we reach the brink of adulthood: who we really are, what we really want, whom to love, how to be.
I read a lot of Forster, as did my friends, growing up in north Staffordshire in the 1980s – probably, to be fair, as a direct result of the trickle of Merchant Ivory adaptations of his novels. My copy is marked 27 June 1989, in neat schoolgirl handwriting, which must be around the same time as I saw the film, which had come out in 1985; Bonham Carter is only six years older than me.
