The Romantic Englishwoman
Joseph Losey (1975)
Elizabeth Fielding (Glenda Jackson) travels on a train to Baden-Baden, where she checks into a hotel. On her way there, then at the hotel reception desk, she sees a young man, Thomas Hursa (Helmut Berger). He was a passenger on the same train; we know, from what he got up to immediately after passing a customs check at the French-German border, that Thomas is smuggling drugs. The train passes through a landscape of bleakly leafless trees, in other words, since this is a Joseph Losey film, there’s a heavy hint of spiritual midwinter even before the opening titles are done. A brumal atmosphere is sustained in Baden-Baden by the hotel’s aspect, outside and in. The building looks somehow frozen. A shot of a hotel corridor, which echoes an earlier shot of the train corridor, drains it of colour. The considered camera movement round the hotel seems to give the place its due while deploring its etiolated opulence. (The cinematographer is Gerry Fisher, Losey’s usual DP in the late 1960s and 1970s.) These early scenes of The Romantic Englishwoman, though not exactly enigmatic, have about them a whiff of Last Year at Marienbaden-Baden. They’re enlivened by Thomas’s puzzling concealment of his narcotic cargo on the hotel roof and his oblique interactions with Elizabeth. She’s both intrigued and amused by him – perhaps amused by being intrigued.
Back in England, Elizabeth’s novelist husband Lewis (Michael Caine) meets with a film producer called Herman (Reinhard Kollhedoff), who wants him to write a screenplay. It’s about a woman who goes somewhere in continental Europe (location to be confirmed) to find herself. Lewis pronounces the idea ‘boring … also pretentious and derivative – but mostly boring’. When Herman asks where Elizabeth is, Lewis explains that she’s in Baden-Baden. If we hadn’t picked up from the opening scenes why she was there, we know now. Lewis tells Herman he’d do better to turn the story into a thriller. Thomas’s drug-peddling offers a sliver of potential for Losey’s film to be one too but that isn’t this director’s style. The only suspense consists in wondering how, and how long, The Romantic Englishwoman, which Tom Stoppard and Thomas Wiseman adapted from the latter’s novel of the same name, can avoid being boring, as well as pretentious and derivative (though also self-aware).
Although he despises Herman’s project, Lewis, of course, accepts the commission. When he phones his wife late at night in Baden-Baden, she ends the conversation abruptly, telling Lewis she needs to get in the hotel lift. This causes him to imagine that Elizabeth – and/or the woman in his screenplay – is in the lift with a man who makes love to her there. Elizabeth does actually share the lift with Thomas, who deliberately takes her to the wrong floor. Supposing he’s trying it on, she makes her way back to her own room alone and decides to return to England the next day. Those train/hotel corridor shots were claustrophobic by design rather than in effect, since the claustrophobia wasn’t connected to the characters’ situation or felt by the viewer. Back at home in Weybridge with Lewis, Elizabeth is soon frustrated by the constraints of her everyday life. This is infectious: you soon feel the same way about the film.
Lewis accuses Elizabeth of being unfaithful on her weekend in Germany (it seems to have been no longer than that) – even before he receives a letter from Thomas in which the latter introduces himself as a poet and an admirer of Lewis’s work, and mentions he met Elizabeth in Baden-Baden. In this fancy life-imitating-art-and-vice–versa set-up, Lewis’s paranoid suspicions have to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. For that to happen, he must improbably invite Thomas to the Fieldings’ home. Once Thomas takes up residence there, as Lewis’s secretary, The Romantic Englishwoman adds the disquieting cuckoo in the nest to its repertoire of cliché. (This serves as a reminder of the scale of Bong Joon-ho’s achievement in reinvigorating the idea in Parasite.) Losey’s film holds your interest thanks only to the erratic casting and performances, and the director’s negligence of what might have been central themes.
According to Wikipedia, Thomas Wiseman’s novel is the ‘story of a novelist who describes in fictional form his wife’s sexual encounter with a sponging self-styled poet in Baden-Baden, and the novelist’s vivid imagination “begets the event”’. By using Lewis as narrator, Wiseman may have set the reader a challenge to sort fact from fiction. This kind of difficulty didn’t occur to me as I watched the film. Lewis’s anxious fantasies seemed easy to spot. He appeared to think in imagery even more hackneyed than Losey’s: the elliptical, shadowed shots of his wife’s sexual encounter in the lift; later, once Lewis has met his nemesis, Elizabeth and Thomas sitting naked together beside a swimming pool. Reading the above-quoted Wikipedia reference afterwards made me think again. Did the film-makers mean to leave us wondering if what’s on the screen is almost entirely Lewis’s literary invention? Although this interpretation doesn’t hold water (see below) I do wonder if Losey uses it as a kind of cover for his own prejudices.
Take, for example, the material’s feminist aspect. When Lewis gives Elizabeth’s gossip-columnist friend Isabel (Kate Nelligan) a piece of his mind, calling her ‘the most boring woman in the world – you are a woman’s destiny of bore’, the startled Isabel replies that ‘Women are an occupied country’. When he asks Elizabeth if she’s discontented, she replies that she would be ‘but I don’t feel I have the right’. When she discovers that Lewis is giving ‘pocket money’ to freeloader Thomas for typing a few letters, she’s furious: why can’t Thomas make himself useful by helping her run the home? In each instance, the apparent feminist import is undermined. Isabel is tiresomely attitudinising. Elizabeth’s diffidence about her discontent may result from her simply being a woman but could also reflect her awareness that, thanks to her husband, she’s a materially privileged woman. Her anger about Thomas’s role in the household seems driven by a different kind of envy of Lewis: he spends more time than Elizabeth does with a man to whom she’s attracted. That last point foreshadows the rebuttal of female emancipation realised in the climax to The Romantic Englishwoman. Elizabeth’s ideas of ‘finding herself’ don’t extend beyond running off with a man sexually more desirable than her husband – a man whose income, from peddling drugs rather than novels, she hopes will be enough to keep them both. The cumulative effect of these things verges on misogyny but if Lewis is creating the story we’re watching, the misogyny can be ascribed to him rather than Losey.
That’s a big if but might be plausible were Lewis a more complex writer than the film allows him to be – even though it does make him a confusing one. The opening conversation with Herman gives the impression that Lewis sees film-writing generally, let alone the scenario he’s offered, as infra dig. It seems he takes on the screenplay job only because the book he’s meant to be writing isn’t progressing. Yet when Thomas, in a desultory attempt to get acquainted with his work before insinuating himself with Lewis, picks up one of his novels at an airport, the cover illustration screams pulp fiction. (It’s one of the film’s better jokes that Thomas buys a second Fielding novel at the airport; when Lewis asks which novel of his is Thomas’s favourite, the latter replies Tom Jones.) Writer’s block may not be the exclusive preserve of serious and/or sham artists but to suggest the remedy for a blocked pulp merchant is to write a movie instead of a book – a movie with a storyline evidently outside his comfort zone – is bizarre.
If Lewis is inventing The Romantic Englishwoman, it’s striking that, until she escapes with Thomas, the plot and presentation of Elizabeth rarely reduce her to the terms in which her husband appears to see her. If that’s explained by the fact that, as a writer, he’s capable of treating his wife less ungenerously in fiction than in reality, you wonder why Lewis has stuck to authoring trashy bestsellers rather than ‘pretentious and derivative’ stuff – especially when there’s nothing in the film to indicate he’s in thrall to commercial considerations, and rather more to suggest that he’s oppressed by money-making success. I suspect he’s labelled a pulp writer because that makes him easier for Losey to despise. It’s impossible to see Lewis, in the role of unreliable creator, as responsible for the other major issue-dodging in the working out of the story. This is around the neurotic worries that he and Elizabeth share, though hers register with more impact.
Lewis’s repeated phone calls to his wife in Baden-Baden are born of anxiety as well as possessiveness; the same combination is in evidence when she returns to England the next day. Lewis goes to Dover, assuming Elizabeth has returned, as she departed, by boat; he doesn’t like her travelling by air and is horrified to learn she’s flown home. The couple have one child, David (Marcus Richardson), who looks about seven or eight. He’s left with Lewis and, more particularly, their French au pair Catherine (Béatrice Romand), when Elizabeth goes to Baden-Baden. Even once she’s back and although she rarely leaves the house, she and Lewis seem to leave most of the child care to Catherine. In subsequent conversations (monologues, in effect), Elizabeth reveals, first, how gruelling she finds raising a child because of the unending weight of responsibility and fear that he’ll come to harm; second, that she sometimes returns home expecting to find ambulances outside. The two neuroses converge when, thanks to Catherine’s inattention (the au pair by now only has eyes for Thomas), David climbs onto the ledge of an open upstairs window. Elizabeth rushes up to the adjoining room, grabs the little boy from where he’s perched and yells at him, weeping with relief as she does so. (This is reminiscent of, though actually more convincingly staged than, Glenda Jackson’s scene with the older child who runs into the road in Sunday Bloody Sunday.) Elizabeth then promptly fires Catherine.
Describing her fears of tragic crisis, Elizabeth explicitly links them to the apparent security of her and Lewis’s lives: she seems to think something must go terribly wrong in punishment for their material good fortune. This is a potentially crucial element in what happens: could it be that, when she takes off with Thomas, Elizabeth wants to be free not only of her stifling husband but also of the intolerable burden of raising a child – that she’s not so much an uncaring mother as a shockingly faint-hearted one? The film’s abandonment of interest in this part of her personality exposes most clearly Losey’s narrow attitude towards Elizabeth.
He plays his hand on this at quite an early stage. On her way back from Baden-Baden, Elizabeth goes hurriedly into an airport shop to buy David a present. She asks the assistant (Frances Tomelty) if the shop has any toys made in Germany. It doesn’t; the assistant offers something made in Japan instead. Elizabeth buys it without a moment’s hesitation. Losey couldn’t make clearer what an afterthought, and how perfunctory, the purchase is. That’s not enough, though. When his mother gets home, David has to wait for his gift until Elizabeth has checked the bedrooms for evidence of Lewis’s infidelity in her absence. Losey is so intent on disparaging his exceedingly affluent characters that he tends to ignore the evidence of what’s distinctively troubled about them.
He also fails to clarify the couple’s cultural context (beyond the mixed-up picture of the kind of writer Lewis is). Their social contacts are media and movie-making people yet the Fieldings live in the stockbroker belt. Other than providing a means of making Elizabeth’s domestic situation more stultifying, this seems be for the sake of a single sequence. On the night of her return from Baden-Baden, she and Lewis have sex, by the light of the moon, in their front garden. They’re interrupted by the arrival home of their city-gent neighbour (Tom Chatto). Lewis hurriedly buttons his fly and exchanges small talk with the man, who informs Lewis (as if they’ve never met before) that he doesn’t himself read books or go to the cinema. The conversation ends with the neighbour’s saying ‘Goodnight, Mrs Fielding’ as a nude Elizabeth heads briskly back towards the house, with a cheery return of his greeting. The briskness is the only believable thing about this – Elizabeth must be freezing. Except for the nudity, the whole scene plays like a third-division 1970s television sitcom.
Glenda Jackson made The Romantic Englishwoman at the peak of her success as a screen actress – at a time when big-name directors were falling over themselves to get her in their film. She’s miscast as Elizabeth, who has a frivolous side that Jackson needs to work too hard to capture. As in the gruesome 1973 rom-com A Touch of Class (for which, inexplicably, she won her second Best Actress Oscar in four years), her vocal power is problematic. Jackson’s delivery of her one-liners is stridently intimidating: the antithesis of a trophy wife, her Elizabeth seems far too much like hard work from Lewis’s point of view. Yet Glenda Jackson’s presence dominates the picture and, in her softer moments, she’s sometimes touching.
At first, Michael Caine cuts a merely ridiculous figure. That changes when Lewis goes for Isabel (Kate Nelligan, in her cinema debut, is assured and precise) – but this outburst also illustrates an uncomfortable blurring of the character’s qualities with the actor’s own, which persists throughout. The high-volume excoriation of Isabel is powerful but excessive. Caine seems to be experiencing a kind of catharsis: Lewis has been made to sound mostly pathetic in the preceding exchanges with Jackson’s Eizabeth; now he can let rip. Caine gives a semblance of credibility to the idea of Lewis as someone of humble origins for whom money hasn’t brought happiness but Losey’s contempt for this nouveau riche makes the inner man’s unease too blatant. Caine looks sleazily unprepossessing.
As a result, the opposition of Lewis and Thomas is almost cartoonishly stark. The Romantic Englishwoman is distinctive in having a separate credit for the wardrobe not of the leading lady but of a male co-star: Helmut Berger wears clothes designed by Yves Saint Laurent. (Ruth Myers did the other costumes.) Berger may be a limited actor but, unlike Jackson and Caine, is perfectly cast, as well as a fine clotheshorse. Thomas is a conceit rather than a character – a means of exposing Elizabeth’s and Lewis’s weaknesses. Berger’s magnetic male-model blankness is ideal for the role, as his toneless voice. Thomas’s words trickle out as if speaking were too much effort. He’s so indolently amoral that he seems not to accept responsibility even for what he’s saying.
It’s inconceivable that this preening fellow has sustained an international criminal career. His inept choice of hiding place for the stash of drugs he brings to Baden-Baden leaves it exposed to the elements – it’s ruined in a downpour. Clumsy as this plotting is (perhaps it was Lewis’s idea), it enables Thomas to make contact with the Fieldings because he needs a safe house. He’s on the run from a drugs baron called Swan (Michael Lonsdale), who eventually tracks him down when Thomas and Elizabeth have embarked on their new life together abroad. (Michael Lonsdale is quietly disturbing as Swan, despite an outfit and make-up that look like leftovers from Modesty Blaise.) Although we’re led to assume that Thomas’s claim to be a poet is untrue, I wasn’t sure if the contents of his attaché case, as revealed to Elizabeth as Swan and his henchmen arrive to apprehend Thomas, were meant to suggest otherwise. The contents include a few exercise books – albeit these could just as easily be for logging drug deals as for jotting down verse. Elizabeth certainly wants Thomas to be a poet (or, as she says, a ‘fucking poet … and a poetical fuck’). If he is, it would be no more improbable than anything else about him.
When Elizabeth asks Lewis what his screenplay is about, he tells her it’s:
‘… about this ungrateful woman who is married to this man of great charm, brilliance and integrity. She thinks he won’t let her be herself, and she feels stuck in a straitjacket when she ought to be out and about and taking the waters and finding herself. So one day, she ups and goes and finds herself out of her depth, but the husband comes and saves her, and then she realises that he’s really a wonderful chap.’
This may be tongue in cheek but it also summarises accurately the plot of The Romantic Englishwoman, except for the very last bit. Lewis and his Bentley appear on the scene to rescue Elizabeth from her continental fugue but the couple don’t seem any happier together as a result. The characters maintain a Losey tradition, established in The Servant and Accident, of playing strange games and attending grisly social gatherings. The Fieldings finally get home to Weybridge to find not ambulances outside but lights on in the house, which is full of guests and bottles of champagne. (Much earlier on, Lewis, to cheer Elizabeth up, decided they’d invite round ‘everyone we know’.) It’s a relief the film ends before this party gets into full swing. Losey closes instead on a shot of Glenda Jackson’s impressively stricken face and with a burst of Richard Hartley’s deceptive music – deceptive because its range of moods, including hints of melancholy that almost suggest compassion for the people in the story, is so at odds with the attitude of the director.
I first saw this film in the spring of 1976 and started writing a note about it (I didn’t get far), which began: ‘At the Cannes Film Festival last year, where The Romantic Englishwoman was being shown out of competition, Joseph Losey was asked by Tony Bilbow in a BBC Film Night interview what the film was about. Losey replied: “It’s about what all of my recent films have been about – the impossibility of having any kind of decent relationship in the society we’re living in”.’ I’ve never forgotten that remark though I could remember nothing about this film. Seeing it again for the first time in forty-four years has helped me understand why that is, on both counts. I suspect The Romantic Englishwoman lacks purchase in the memory largely because its glib slipperiness around what is and isn’t ‘real’ makes everything weightless. I’m pretty sure that Losey’s words have stayed with me because nearly every other film of his I’ve seen in the meantime – a total into double figures, even excluding those I’d seen before 1976 – has served as a reminder of what he said to Tony Bilbow, and how disingenuous it was. The reason the cinema of Joseph Losey shows a world bereft of decent relationships is that he forbids them.
17 May 2020