Maurice (1987)

Maurice is based on a novel by EM Forster and considering this is a Merchant-Ivory production, the film is pretty interesting, daring even (almost). Yes, this is a film in love with its time period (the years before WWI), its props, its sense for innovation, its mannerisms and neuroses. But it is also a film about love. Maurice is the young bourgeois kid who falls in love with a fellow Cambridge man. Their love story does not work out well, as the other lover is more interested in Plato than his lover. His friend becomes a pillar of society, a man who passes the time strolling around his estate and making politics and a name, while Maurice broods and whiles away his time in a boring business office in London. The story revolves around love of the unspeakable kind, the tensions it reveals, the strange glances of people who know, who suspect, who guess. As a film, this is nothing out of the ordinary, but this is not to say that the film lacks style or inventiveness. It is, I must admit, terribly elegant, capturing details and taking its time to tell the story. As an adaptation of the novel, this is a pretty decent attempt at being true to the source. In a exquisitely tasteful way, Maurice takes a deep breath of a society full of lies and pretense. The shortcoming of the film - and the book - is extremely crude depictions of class differences.