‘The Remains of the Day’

This Merchant-Ivory production is a beautifully melancholy romance between two British people who point-blank refuse to acknowledge emotional attachments and, constricted by an unwritten professional code, can’t even bring themselves to address each other by first names. While the thought of all this decorous self-denial between a butler and a housekeeper (Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, pictured, never better) in the days before World War II may sound uninvolving, this 1993 film is quite the opposite (HBO Friday at 5:45 p.m.).