Rent Maurice (1987)

Glittering but flawed - Maurice review by SB

I had not previously seen this Merchant Ivory costume drama although it was made over 30 years ago. Nor have I read the Forster novel upon which it is based, so I can say nothing about how well the film encapsulates the book. But on its own terms at least there is much to admire about the film. It is rather like a beautifully-made watch. Everything works – the direction and cinematography are perfect, the casting is spot-on, not just for the lead roles but also for supporting parts, the locations are beautiful but seem perfectly natural for the story.

This was a fairly brave film to make in the 1980s, when public sentiment towards male homosexuality had turned negative again in the wake of the AIDs crisis.

So there are many things to commend. However, for me there are two glaring problems. And I cannot say whether these arise from the film or the original text. The first is that the relationship between Maurice and Scudder seems so unlikely. Not because it is between two men but because they are so incompatible in every way except lust. Scudder is portrayed as a nasty amoral little man, the very opposite of Maurice.

Secondly, although the film ends romantically with Maurice and Scudder holed up in the boathouse making love by firelight, a none too subtle contrast with the (presumed) unsatisfactory marriage of Durham and Anne, that totally avoid the questions which Duham has posed earlier in the film – how are two men in such a relationship to actually live together in that pre-WWI world, a world which has rejected them socially and legally? Maurice proclaims that he is an outlaw, and that is precisely what he is becoming; but the implications of that are never shown. The problems would be compounded by the social and mental incompatibility already mentioned. It's difficult to avoid comparisons with the ending of the same team's film of Forster's 'A Room With A View', where a couple also defy convention – but where the same societal problems will never arise in such an overwhelming way, especially as the male hero of that story is far less dependent anyway on society's approval for practical things like money. Maybe at the end of the day the difference is the point; but it would have been braver still to have confronted these issues head on.