‘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.

Thompson, who has been playing these quivering old- maid types since she was about 15, might have simply tried to wedge herself into the shoes left by Maggie Smith’s Charlotte. Instead she’s had her own custom-made. This Charlotte may quaver and gossip and judge, but she has a young and tender heart and is as mindful of the tyranny of the time as Lucy, if not as free to demand its overthrow.

When we first meet Mr. Emerson, Spall seems a surprising, almost off-putting choice. He has been recently seen as the rodent-like and murderous Peter Pettigrew in the last few “Harry Potter” movies, and there is even here a red-faced, mouth-breathing quality. But his sweaty almost-vulgarities quickly become endearing because they are rooted in such a pure insistence on truth-telling. And if his relationship with George seems particularly tender and sympathetic, it’s not surprising because Rafe Spall is Timothy Spall’s son.

Rafe is mercifully much better looking than his old man and, wearing a wide-open face and sporting a Cockney accent, conveys the attraction of and the trouble with his heart-on-sleeve courtship.

As the kind-hearted clergyman Mr. Beebe, Mark Williams (also a “Harry Potter” regular but last seen in “Sense and Sensibility”) represents the other end of the sexual spectrum, gracefully if somewhat mournfully resigned to repression. “Cecil Vyse is, like me, not the sort of man who should matter. Though I don’t think he knows it yet,” he says of the young man to whom Lucy becomes briefly engaged, and in that line we see both wry acceptance of things as they are, and a lifetime of sorrow. And yes, that is Elizabeth McGovern as Lucy’s mother, and she holds up beautifully as the lone American among a bunch of Brits.

It is difficult to imagine a story with better scenery -- I’ll watch anything that takes me through the side streets of Florence and into the English countryside by way of Tuscany -- or a more simply drawn exploration of complicated romance. If it all ends in a hazy miasma of tragedy and rediscovery, so be it. Those moments of early free-falling love are the closest most of us get to transcendence. Certainly they are worth revising and revisiting, and leaving quietly, reverently, once we are through.

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mary.mcnamara @latimes.com

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Masterpiece Classic: ‘A Room With a View’

Where: KCET

When: 9 to 10:30 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)