How travel can alter our lives forever: A Room with a View (1985)

          The 1985 film, A Room with a View is based on E.M. Forster’s novel of the same name. If you look for a synopsis of the movie online or ask for one to anyone who’s seen the movie , you’ll probably be told that it’s a story about a young man and woman who fall in love while vacationing in Florence and how they altered each other’s lives forever. However, A Room with a View, is so much more than that. Through a beautiful love story, the film shows us how traveling can forever alter our lives in unexpected ways.

      Travel and a simple room with a view--that’s all it took for a love story to embark. Lucy Honeychurch, a well-bread English lady, traveled to Florence with her cousin Charlotte Bartlett where she met the love of her life, George Emerson. During her trip, Lucy lived an adventure complete with a world wind romance. Once she returned home, the romance, as well as every other trip event, became a memory. She returned to her old home, and tried to get back to her normal life which entailed her marrying another man, Cecil Vyse. What Lucy soon found out after her return home when, coincidentally, George moved with his father to Lucy’s town, was that her trip had forever changed her in unexpected ways. Her past clashed with her presently changed self and developed a struggle within her that forced her to accept her present self.

 

       One of the film’s characters, a novelist called Eleanor Lavish, describes Lucy as a: “A young girl, transfigured by Italy! And why shouldn't she be transfigured?”. Some will say love was the force that transfigured her and, to an extent, that is correct. Nevertheless, I say Florence and travel were the primary things that changed her life forever. In Florence, she met George, let go of her inhibitions, and, most importantly, fell in love. She fell in love while she was a tourist. She fell in love because she was a tourist. When one travels, one feels content and at peace. These feelings, in turn, permit you to open up to new experiences because, ultimately, this is what is searched for when one travels.  Travel opened her up to love and permitted her to fall into it. Florence and traveling were the ultimate wingmen.

When we travel: we change in unexpected ways. We come back expecting to go back to our old lives, but it results impossible because, even if it may not be noticeable, we are forever changed just like Mrs. Lucy. Therefore, travel as much as you can because one way or another you will be changed.