Stiff Upper Lips
Stiff Upper Lips 1998 is a broad parody of British period films, especially the lavish MerchantIvory productions of the eighties and early nineties. Although it specifically targets A Room with a View, Chariots of Fire, Maurice, A Passage to India, and many other films, in a more general way Stiff Upper Lips satirises popular perceptions of certain Edwardian traits propriety, sexual repression, xenophobia, and class snobbery.
England, 1908 Emily Ivory Cates is a wealthy young woman who lives with her Aunt Agnes Scales at Ivorys End, a large country house. At 22, as her aunt constantly reminds her, she is verging on spinsterhood. She meets her brothers best friend, Cedric Trilling Portal, when the two come home from university. Aunt Agnes wants the two to fall in love Cedric, however, is a pompous bore who is overly fond of quoting Homer on all sorts of notquiteappropriate occasions also, hes a repressed homosexual. When Emilys aunt sees the sparks failing to fly, she whisks everyone off to Italy, then India, hoping the romantic locations will bring on love.Emilys eye, however, soon wanders to the familys new manservant, George Pertwee, a sturdy peasant who, earlier in the film, had the effrontery to fling off all his clothes and save her life when she was drowning in a pond. Now, Emily cant seem to forget his tall, manly frame and his ripping set of unmentionables. George, a sort of HeathcliffGamekeeperWorking Class Hero hybrid, has a peculiar way of entering a room he rushes in, slides to a stop in the middle of the floor with eyes blazing and one shoulder forward, and tosses his cap aside. ........
Source: Wikipedia
