The Romantic Englishwoman (1975)

'You see, the bourgeois life does have its compensations...'

‘A bored middle-aged, middle-class wife on the verge of a mid-life crisis…’

Mention the director, Joseph Losey, and the film everyone remembers is The Servant (1963), followed, perhaps, by Accident (1967)- covered in an earlier post- and The Go-Between (1970), Losey's beautifully made period drama, based on the novel by L. P. Hartley. It makes sense; all three films (written in collaboration with Harold Pinter) deserve their considerable reputations. And then there's the lesser-known The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), with a script by Tom Stoppard and Tom Wiseman, based on Wiseman’s novel of 1971- a film, admittedly, I came late to, catching it for the first time on late-night television a year or two ago, and now having seen it about three times, a film which grows on me with each viewing.

Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) plays a bored, middle-aged, middle-class wife on the verge of a mid-life crisis, married to Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine), a successful, self-made writer of pulp fiction, living in bourgeois, designer bliss in Weybridge Surrey, which means: a largish Edwardian house (white pebble-dash and glass gazebo) and a crunchy gravel drive on which to park Lewis's Bentley S2. Losey's especially good on Englishness, and as with his other films, there's a terrific sense of place- of the damp English suburban garden, lit by a strange luminance- a witches' night- casting long shadows over the lawn, accompanied by the bark of the neighbours' dog and the odd screech of an owl. And as Elizabeth prunes her roses or Lewis types, a jet airliner sucks its way across the sky on the flight path to Heathrow- for Losey is a master of detail and precision.

‘Losey’s sense of place; a witches’ night…’

Anyway, Elizabeth has a sort of melt down, taking the train to the wedding-cake confection of Baden-Baden- the grand German spa town, a Teutonic Cheltenham, a mecca for gambling, health and chilly gaslit parks, where obese Germans irrigate their derrières with Badoit and Irma Bunt lookalikes rule the roost: carrot juice heaven.