Maurice

Part of our Merchant Ivory Mini Season inspired by the recent documentary about this remarkable period-movie powerhouse.

A very young Hugh Grant and James Wilby star in this intensely poignant story of two young men forced to deny their love.

EM Forster’s novel Maurice, unpublished in his own lifetime, often gets treated as an outlier in his work, and maybe this superlative 1987 film version was first thought of as an outlier in the prestigious Merchant Ivory canon. However, clearly capitalising on the '80s Varsity chic of Chariots of Fire and the TV Brideshead Revisited, it is darker, less picturesque.

The film explores the Cambridge social circuit, with its cricket matches and country-pile parties, that the title character is expected to inhabit: the gay period drama the world wasn't ready for.

Maurice tells us much more about a certain kind of unformulated English discontent, suppressed hysteria and the idealised longing for beauty in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trial. Britain’s educated classes may be encouraged at the age of 19 or 20 to study classics and make a poignantly brief acquaintance with the ancient Greeks and their idea of love. But then they were required to endure decades of conformism and dreary work in – as here – stockbroking or a mediocre political career. It is not simply gay sex that is rejected, but sexual pleasure itself.

Thirty years after Maurice, the remarkable James Ivory would adapt André Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name for Luca Guadagnino – a similar movie, though Maurice differs in that it is about a love affair between two social equals who are the same age. Perhaps that is partly why there is no future in it, and why Maurice is to find love with Scudder. (Oliver and Elio in Call Me By Your Name are an older and a younger, an Achilles and Patroclus pairing). Maurice is a candid, lucid, passionate film.

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