From Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1975. — J.R.
Romantic Englishwoman, The
Great Britain/France, 1975 Director: Joseph Losey
Elizabeth Fielding arrives in Baden Baden on holiday; on the
same train is Thomas Hursa, carrying a supply of drugs, which he
hides on the roof of the luxury hotel where Elizabeth is staying.
Her husband Lewis, a successful novelist now at work on a
screeinplay about a discontented woman who leaves her
husband, phones her at midnight. While Elizabeth converses
with Thomas in a lift, Lewis imagines her making love with
a man in a similar situation (an image which he uses in his
screenplay); he rings her again at 12:30 and she answers
belatedly, saying that she will be home in Weybridge the
next day. Thomas’ drug supply is destroyed in the rain
and he flees when he discovers that Swan, a drug contact, is
looking for him. When Elizabeth returns at night, she and Lewis
start to make love on their front lawn, but are interrupted by a
neighbor. After expressing his suspicion that his wife was
unfaithful in Baden Baden, Lewis receives a letter from Thomas
describing himself as a poet and admirer of Lewis’ work and
mentioning that he met Elizabeth in Baden Baden. He arrives
one afternoon for tea and stays on as a house guest at
Lewis’ insistence and despite Elizabeth’s protests. Finding
her son David on the roof one day while Thomas coaches
the au pair Catherine in her English, Elizabeth flies into a
rage, implying that the two are having an affair, and
Catherine leaves the house. When Elizabeth and Thomas go
out to dinner, he is recognized by an underworld figure and
decides to leave at once. After returning home, and being caught
by Lewis in an embrace with Thomas, Elizabeth decides to leave
with him. They travel to the Mediterranean, where Thomas resumes
his drug trade and his former work as a gigolo while only
occasionally seeing Elizabeth. He phones Lewis, who drives to the
south of France to fetch his wife, and is followed by Swan. Thomas
is finally led away by Swan, and Elizabeth returns home with Lewis,
where they find a party which they arranged beforehand in progress
in their house.
Why does Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) go to Baden Baden? Is the
drug supply that Thomas (Helmut Berger) deals in heroin or
cocaine? Do Elizabeth and Thomas sleep together in Baden Baden?
Is the Herman with whom Lewis (Michael Caine) discusses his
screenplay a producer or director? Is the screenplay, and Lewis’
accompanying suspicions and manipulations, a response to
Elizabeth’s restlessness and behaviour, or the cause of it? Thanks to
the oddly slick and rudderless direction of an equally bantering and
unstable script, The Romantic Englishwoman tends to place all
these varied ambiguities on roughly the same level — eliciting, in the
final analysis, something closer to a shrug than any deep concern
about whether the solutions to these mysteries actually matter.
The shame of it is that the basic material might have led somewhere
fruitful: the chicken-or-egg enigma about Lewis’ suspicions of
Elizabeth’s infidelity, balanced by Elizabeth’s own suspicions of an
affair between Thomas and the au pair Catherine, could have
resulted in an intriguing treatment of the causes and effects of a
bored bourgeois imagination; and at least Joseph Losey and his
writers [Thomas Wiseman, author of the source novel, and Tom
Stoppard] go to the trouble of offering Caine and Jackson one
disproportionate and dramatically effective tirade apiece —
against Elizabeth’s friend Isabel and Catherine, respectively —
which help to underline this theme. Unfortunately, the
filmmakers’ own bourgeois imaginations seem to have become
comparably bored, and these mini-climaxes turn out to mark
the limits of the concept where they might have worked better
as a starting point. Too many assumptions about the ’emptiness’
of Elizabeth’s and Lewis’ lives are taken to be self-evident and
not worthy of exposition or elucidation, while Thomas curiously
winds up serving as a more improbable fantasy figure for the
audience — quasi-inept drug-dealing gigolo as Authentic
Existential Hero — than he does for the Fieldings. The fatal
miscalculation behind the film rests in this imbalance: when
Losey depicts Lewis’ imagined screenplay as a string of
Hollywood parodies, the implication appears to be that The
Romantic Englishwoman itself rises above such nonsense.
But from the moment we follow Elizabeth’s horse-drawn
progress through a supposedly ‘real’ Baden Baden, we are
clearly within a postcard kingdom in which Continental
drug deals and diverse upper-class revels are no less
stereotyped than the supposed fantasies. And the figure
of Thomas, bandied about like a glamorous symbol-prop,
seems to function more as an expedient plot mechanism
than as a character in his own right, which makes his
implied superiority to Elizabeth and Lewis a questionable
matter indeed. Losey’s style has always tended towards a
considerable amount of moral didacticism which has usually
depended on psychological demonstrations. The Romantic
Englishwoman keeps the didacticism while dropping most
of the demonstration, so that ‘distanciation’ from the two
central characters appears to derive mainly from a lack of
interest in them, and a copious use of window reflections and other
mirror images registers principally as window dressing. What
remains is a perfectly adequate and watchable (if romantically
routine) expression of the very milieu and sensibility that the film
professes to expose and despise.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
