The other night I watched Maurice, the 1897 Merchant-Ivory movie based on the book by EM Forster.Recently I badly wanted to read the novel, but it is not available on Kindle. I had heard that it's a frank story about a gay man in England at the turn of the century, and was very curious about it. It was published posthumously.
Maurice is a young gay man that has an intense romantic friendship with a college friend. The romance is physical, but it seems that the friend, played by Hugh Grant, never wanted to go all the way sexually (if I understood correctly). Eventually Grant's character becomes too afraid of living the life of a gay man, and renounces his romance with Maurice and marries a woman.
Maurice is tormented by his sexual feelings and goes to a doctor and hypnotist, to no avail. Eventually (SORRY: Giving away the plot), a servant falls in love with Maurice and pursues him. They have a few passionate encounters, a little relationship drama, and the movie ends with them together. How they would navigate the class and sexual mores of the time is unclear.
Maurice is beautifully and sensitively told, and I'm not sure why I didn't quite love it.
3 comments:
Diana, what about posting some of your father's unpublished artwork and photos of him at work?
I'm not sure how I would go about that... any suggestions?
Well, he was such a talent, I feel he deserves the time and effort. If you have the art and photos, you could scan and save as JPGs. If some art is too large to scan, you could use a camera. I searched but was unable to find any photo of him on Internet or in Newspaper Archive. It would also be interesting to read whatever you might write about him.
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