'Room' with fresh amenities

Twenty years and a life with Tim Burton later, Helena Bonham Carter's pre-Raphaelite ingenue days are so far behind her she's selling human meat pies on Fleet Street with Sweeney Todd. So clearly it's time to have another go at E.M. Forster's "A Room With a View" -- especially since it provides such a lovely natural transition from the recent weeks of Jane Austen's greatest hits Sunday night on "Masterpiece."

This "Room," just like the "Sense and Sensibility" that concluded last week, is adapted by Andrew Davies, who seems to be on a bit of a tear these days -- his take on "Brideshead Revisited" is due in theaters in July. Fortunately, he's awfully good at what he does, which lately seems to be retelling highly romanticized tales in ordinary human terms, or as ordinary and human as you can get in period dress with sylvan landscapes scattered all over the place.

"A Room With a View" chronicles, as Forster so often does, the sexual awakening of a repressed British person. The person in this case is young Lucy Honeychurch (Elaine Cassidy), who visits Florence, Italy, with her high-strung, highly proper twitch of a cousin, Charlotte (Sophie Thompson). There she meets Mr. Emerson (Timothy Spall) and his son George (Rafe Spall), a pair as unpretentious and good-hearted as they are, well, common. They think people ought to be able to do what makes them happy, manners and mores be damned, which is shocking and seductive to the quietly seething Lucy.

So amid the lavender and cypress in the sun-drenched Tuscan hills, she and George fall into scandalous embrace, torn apart at once by convention and, of course, Charlotte. Back in England passion does battle with propriety, and if you don't know which triumphs, you should reacquaint yourself with Forster.

Much less fey and luminous than the famous Merchant Ivory production, which launched Bonham Carter's career, this "Room" not only keeps but revels in the common touch -- the floors creak, the rooms in question are small and dim, the accents are varying degrees of less than posh.

Still, when "Masterpiece" puts together a less-than-perfect cast, I'll be the first to let you know. It certainly ain't here. Cassidy's Lucy is a real live girl, not a romantic portrait of one, who charming- ly finds her cousin's conventions inexplicable and exasperating yet is not able to sum- mon enough courage to flout them when push comes to shove.