Although the novel Maurice by the British author E.M. Forster was not published until 1979, a year after the author’s death, the manuscript already existed in the 1910s. An evidently personal work based on a homosexual love story, it was a provocative piece in British society at the time, as Forster was a famous and celebrated writer.
In 1987, James Ivory adapted the novel for the screen, having filmed Forster’s A Room with a View a couple of years earlier. Like its predecessor, Maurice successfully created a highly detailed likeness of the world of the British upper classes at the beginning of the 20th century. The set and costume design are eye-catching, and James Wilby and Hugh Grant above all are convincing, both at the onset of their careers. Their faces become masks of inner conflict and the screen characters they create are often tragic actors of their own lives.
The film’s technical merits were immediately recognised. Over the years, it has grown in reputation as a historically significant manifestation of the homosexual experience. Love is undoubtedly at the heart of the film, but everything else is built around it. Maurice becomes a depiction of a society full of confrontations, where nothing is what it seems. A description of a world plunging into the unknown – the modern.
Veli-Matti Huhta