Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Simply Perfect

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Elizabeth Fielding (Glenda Jackson) returns from spa town Baden Baden, Germany where she met gigolo conman Thomas (Helmut Berger). Her husband Lewis (Michael Caine) is having writer's block and imagines all manners of things his wife is doing. Catherine is the hot nanny. Isabel (Kate Nelligan) is Elizabeth's gossiping friend who Lewis hates. Swan (Michael Lonsdale) is tracking Thomas. Then Thomas shows up at the Fielding home.The couple never intrigued me. They have limited chemistry. Part of the problem is that the movie starts with them apart. They never really connect for me. Neither is the affair that compelling. There is a coldness to the movie. Maybe it's the intent to show a relationship in trouble. It does it in an uninteresting way.

My very first contact with Joseph Losey's canon is this film adapted from Thomas Wiseman's eponymous novel, the reason why I selected this one purely because of its cast, namely for Glenda Jackson, the two-times Oscar winner, whose work has eluded me until now, but the film itself turns out to be a very disappointing misfire.Speaking of the cast, Glenda Jackson has her charismatic dignity in almost every scene although regularly shoehorned between Berger's perpetual snug grin and Caine's perpetual sullen stare, and eventually cannot save the film from the mire of a psychological drama swamped with behavioral absurdities and non-consistent narrative. The fierce-looking wife with a bob cut and perfectly trimmed fringes, who is discontent with her middle-class lifestyle (her writer husband has immersed into the writer's block when writing a film script and becomes paranoid about her adultery in her solo trip to Baden-Baden), tries her luck to elope with a self-claimed German poet (whose real identity is only hinted by smuggling small-time drugs and cruising of elderly lonely-hearts), whom she has met before in Baden- Baden, but is there a fling between them in their previous encounter? The film never answer the question, a corny exploit being overused here. Richard Harley's lyrical string score has stolen the thunder since more often than not, I am very much a visual observer than a sonic perfectionist. Also I quite prefer the slowly panning camera in carefully constructing a hunter and prey game in the beginning part in Baden- Baden to the dreadful and ostentatious meandering in the labyrinth of feigned sentimentality, claiming inane quips like "Englishwoman is the most romantic" (Berger's German accent is a major buzz-killer), I hope someone else could be fortunate enough to fully digest all the hocus-pocus and be grateful towards this ill-fated film adaption.

This film has impeccable credentials as art-house entertainment but whether it actually delivers on what it promises is another matter. I wouldn't say that it's completely successful, but it is intriguing and tries not to insult the audience's intelligence.Directed by Joseph Losey, written by Tom Stoppard and starring Glenda Jackson and Michael Caine, the film borrows heavily from the theories of Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. That is, the characters in the piece come to understand that they only exist within the mind of the writer who has created them. The writer in this instance is Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine), who is suffering from writers block, but believes his wife Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) is having an affair with a German gigolo she has met at an exclusive spa on a recent trip to Europe. Well, maybe she is, maybe she isn't – it doesn't seem to be the point, but then nothing else does either when you come to think of it. On Jackson's return to England, this mysterious young man follows her and Caine imagines all kinds of things that may or may not have taken place between them. I think that by the end of the film Caine and Jackson realise how much they love each other and isn't life interesting that they've had this adventure and now they can get back together and blah, blah, blah.The film is not really as deep as it would like to think it is, but it does attempt to pull off something different to the conventional form of story telling which is dependent on linear narrative, within a given time frame and moving exclusively forward in time. 'The Romantic Englishwoman' becomes a bit befuddling since the viewer is not given enough clues as to what may be going on in the 'real' world as opposed to the imaginings of the writer Fielding as he attempts to figure out if his wife is having an affair with the mysterious man she met in Europe or not.This kind of experimental filmmaking is interesting, but film, is more dependent upon narrative rather than theoretical imaginings to get its point across. Pirandello wrote exclusively for the stage and apparently his experiments with form worked within that medium. What is going on in somebody's mind is legendarily impossible to record on film and the reason why many literary adaptations are failures, or why many classic novels in the past have never been filmed at all. The written word is able to tease our imaginations into believing that we are privy to a character's private thoughts since we are literally reading the words off a page.Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson surrender themselves to the film's conceit and they both come out blameless if the project was not perhaps the success it should have been. Michael Caine has a wonderful and very bitchy 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.'Romantic Englishwoman' tries to do something different and considering some of the meretricious material that gets made, we should be grateful for the efforts of director Joseph Losey and writer Tom Stoppard. I did not keep my copy on VHS and I cannot with the waning of the years, count on the fact that even though I have remembered it for as long as I have I will continue to do so. Bring on the DVD!

Spa towns seem to have an odd effect on film-makers. Alain Resnais' "Last year in Marienbad", set in the Czech spa town of that name, has a reputation for being bafflingly obscure, so much so that it won itself a place in Michael and Harry Medved's "Fifty Worst Films of All Time". And then there is Joseph Losey's "The Romantic Englishwoman", part of which is set in the German spa town of Baden Baden.The plot concerns Elizabeth, the "romantic Englishwoman" of the title and the wife of a well-known novelist. While staying in Baden Baden Elizabeth has an affair with a young German named Thomas. Or does she? Is it possible that this "affair" was simply a fantasy on her part? Or does it only exist in the mind of her jealous husband Lewis? Thomas, an admirer of Lewis' work, later comes to stay with Lewis and Elizabeth at their home in England, where Lewis makes him surprisingly welcome for a man who is (or whom he believes to be) his wife's lover. There is also a sub-plot about Thomas' criminal associates, led by a man named Swan, who are pursuing him across Europe, but the exact details remain vague.There is an adage that one should never judge a book by its cover, and the cinematic equivalent would probably be "don't judge a film by the big names in its title sequence". Even if you have admired the other work of those names. Michael Caine (now Sir Michael) is one of the cinema's greatest stars, appearing in some of the best British films of the sixties, seventies and eighties such as "Alfie", "Get Carter" and "Educating Rita". Glenda Jackson is today best known as a Labour politician, but was a fine actress in her youth. Scriptwriter Tom Stoppard is perhaps Britain's greatest living playwright. Losey was best known to me as the director of "The Go-Between", one of the major British films of the early seventies and one of the films which started the "heritage cinema" movement.Unfortunately, all this assembled talent does not make for a good film. "The Romantic Englishwoman" goes to show that baffling obscurity was not a monopoly of the Nouvelle Vague and that British art-house film-makers could be just as infuriatingly obscure as their French counterparts. (Losey was American by birth, but I count him as an honorary Briton. He was forced to leave Hollywood during the McCarthy era because of his left-wing sympathies and thereafter worked mostly in Britain). I would not quite count this among my all-time fifty worst films, but it is nevertheless a dull and confusing one which not only lacks a clear storyline but also lacks any perceptible point. There are some films where ambiguity can be a positive virtue rather than a fault, but this is not one of them. 4/10