The Romantic Englishwoman [DVD]

.(THE FILM)
A successful novelist, faced with writer's block, invites a handsome young German poet into to his home to provide input for his troubled screenplay. However, little does the author know that the guest had previously embarked on an affair with his wife and wishes to continue their relationship..
what can I say?
this movie is.Intriguing and mysterious at the same time...
that is a showcase for its two Oscar-winning stars: Michael Caine (Hannah and Her Sisters) and Glenda Jackson (Women in Love).
The stars are excellent.Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth. She is a complex character with needs and desires overlooked by her husband.she is romantic. And he is jealous.Michael Caine has a wonderful and very confrontation with Kate Nelligan playing Elizabeth's friend, in which he exposes his own insecurity about losing his wife, rather than bullying her friend into thinking that his wife no longer values their friendship..
With a sparklingly witty screenplay from Academy Award-winner Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love) and an "elaborate visual style with glamorous and elegant setting" framed by director Joseph Losey (The Servant)
The Romantic Englishwoman is a sparklingly intelligent, wildly entertaining ride.
A sophisticated love story, That is a so "masterfully acted "

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On paper, the credentials of this 1975 movie are very strong. Script by one foremost playwright Tom Stoppard; one of the finest directors of noir-ish unease, Joseph Losey, working with regular collaborators Gerry Fisher (camera) and Reginald Beck (editor); two real heavyweights, Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, as the leads. However, it has to be said that the film really doesn't live up to its credentials.

The story is complex. Elizabeth Fielding (Jackson) leaves her writer husband Lewis (Caine) temporarily and retreats to Baden-Baden where she may or may not have had an affair with drug-runner and gigolo Thomas (Helmut Berger). Alternatively, it's her fantasy, or yet again Lewis's fantasy about her. However, Thomas is real, because he turns up on the doorstep and scrounges into their married life, eventually having the affair which Lewis believed had taken place all along. Marital bust-up is resolved when Thomas' past catches up with him and he's taken away by some gangsters who will probably kill him, and Lewis takes his wife back.

The central problem is in the writing, or maybe the plot of the original novel: the premise - a kind of "Last Year in Baden-Baden" - is much more interesting than the resolution, as the film turns progressively into a conventional thriller which fails to thrill. The reason for the hounding of Thomas is particularly fatuous. I think Pinter, another regular Losey collaborator, would have made a much more interesting, and less talkative, version by concentrating on the Resnais-like ambiguities of the triangle relationship, and teasing out the fantasy/reality aspects.

The acting somehow also fails to gel, and I think this is down to central miscasting. Jackson is a very fine actress, but romantic she is not. Her intelligence is too formidable for us to believe she would fall for this egotistical wastrel, especially when played as blandly as it is by Berger. Julie Christie we would believe, Glenda - no. There is also a kind of distance in Caine too. His early work is perhaps best symbolised by the trademark black-rim glasses, which create a barrier between the viewer and the actor. It's only in later films he becomes good at emotion - his great strength as a star earlier is reticence. Here he is required to do obsession, and he's not quite up to it, although he is very good at anger, and his pointless explosion at the feminist friend, Isabel, is one of the highlights of the film.

Losey directs with his usual elegance and precision. The film is full of mirrors and shots of people reflected in glass, appropriate to the theme. The hotel location is particularly well used - vast ornate oppressive public spaces, elsewhere endless corridors and anonymous rooms from which people make meaningless entrances and exits. But it all feels a little mannered, making all the right moves but without the passion - even passionate disgust - of Losey's early movies. Curiosity value only.