When you find "The Romantic Englishwoman" on IMDB, you might notice that the poster displayed (at least currently) makes the movie look like a porno picture! Jackson is wearing practically nothing and the pose is quite provocative. While there is a bit of nudity in the film and its plot about adultery, it's not a porno picture and I hate when unscrupulous studios try to mismarket movies this way. And, if you are looking for a skin flick, you definitely should look elsewhere.

When the story begins, Elizabeth Fielding (Glenda Jackson) is on holiday by herself at a German spa town. She wants some alone time as well as to 'discover' herself. Her husband is a writer who is at home with the kids and she either had an affair when she's there or wants to have one and imagines it (it's a bit vague due to the direction but it looked like she probably DID engage in an affair). She arrives back home and at first their reunion is very passionate, as the Fieldings make love on their front lawn...something most couples only do on occasion (perhaps every other week)! But the marriage returns to the tedium that apparently drove her to take this solo vacation in the first place. and, soon the man she had an affair with (or fantasized about) arrives for a visit and, oddly, Mr. Fielding's writers block seems to disappear.



Despite this film being about a troubled marriage and adultery, it's also amazingly sterile and, perhaps, dull. I agree with another reviewer who also felt this way. They thought having the film begin with the husband and wife apart and for such a big part of the movie further emphasized this sterility and made you care much less about the Fieldings or their marriage. Too often, performances are rather stodgy and the fireworks you might expect just aren't there most of the time. It is not another "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"...where a couple's relationship spirals out of control with vitriol and tons of emotion.

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.

Joseph Losey's theme here is borders — the limits that we set in order to transgress them.

Borders are arbitrary, disputable. So in the railway car one man says they are in Germany, the other France.

Between them is Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) who has left her family and posh French estate in search of a cure at the waters of Baden Baden. But she limits her escape to wildness to an intemperate bet at roulette. She spots the handsome young gigolo Thomas (Helmut Berger) but responds with bemusement not lust. The latter is what her novelist husband Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine) imagines for her when on the phone she tells him she's going for a lift (aka elevator). As she lives her life she also lives his more lurid — and cliché — fantasy.

Dashing young Thomas makes a career of crossing borders. He hijacks a hotel dinner cart to sup outside. His passport declares him "poet" — the wilder version of the husband novelist. Rootless and amoral, he delivers hot cars and cool cocaine to shady men and romantic delusions to wealthy spinsters. "The English women are the worst," he says, "They want everything."

That covers Elizabeth: she has the optimum home, cute son, handsome successful loving husband, but she also wants — she knows not what. There is still a fire in her marriage, as we see when she and Lewis make wild love on their lawn, interrupted by their neighbour's headlights (another scene of transgressed borders). The title elides the border between English and Woman.

The other border scriptwriter Tom Stoppard plays with here is that between fiction and life. That's his familiar territory. He made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the brilliant modernist comedy that moved between the familiar life of Hamlet's play and the off-stage life centered on his two bit-part friends. Our experience of Elizabeth's life is paralleled by — or filtered through? — her husband's attempt to draw a fiction out of his life. He's writing a screenplay (this one?) about a woman who goes somewhere to find herself. To avoid the cliché he tries to turn that into a thriller.

Which is what he does to his wife's life. Lewis likes to set up a life situation to see what will happen. After his phone chat with Elizabeth we see he's having a drink with a scantily clad girl. She's their au pair but Lewis ends his experiment by sending her off to bed. The girl finds herself in another man's plot later when Thomas takes her to a movie, then distracts her from her duties — dangerously — with the pretence to help her English. The girl is fired but Thomas's stay as Lewis's putative secretary continues. The authors survive their characters.

Lewis has invited Thomas first to visit, then to stay, as a kind of experiment. He wants to see what will happen between Thomas and Elizabeth, to see if they have indeed cuckolded him as his aberrant fantasy tells him. As a writer he wants to watch what develops. As a husband he tries to exorcise — or exercise — his insecurity. He is determined to catch his wife at infidelity. He pushes them into the date at which Thomas is spotted by his nemesis, forcing his departure, the brief intimacy with Elizabeth that Lewis catches, and the lovers' escape to Italy (over another border) where they play out their — and Lewis's — doomed fantasy. When Thomas calls Lewis to come take her home, Lewis is followed by the shady men whose cocaine Thomas has lost to the rain and he's finished. He has crossed his last border.

As a vagabond rapscallion Thomas identifies himself with a Fielding character, Tom Jones. Not his fault it's the wrong Fielding. He read him in translation.

The normalcy to which Lewis returns Elizabeth is the sadly escapist party they had planned and — as we did — forgotten. Our glimpse of that festivity is of a desperate, pathetic attempt to kick over the traces — cross the border — of our normal, contained life. That is a hardly promising vision of the life to which the lively wife, reined in, returns. It's yet another scene her novelist husband has arranged for them to "live."