6 - “The Arrival of Strangers”: The Romantic Englishwoman

Summary

By turns wry and bitter, The Romantic Englishwoman is a sexual comedy, a social satire, even a domestic melodrama – with a curious thread of the crime thriller woven in for good measure. It is also a gloss on themes and formal elements that preoccupied Losey throughout his artistic life. He compared the film, which was written by Thomas Wiseman and Tom Stoppard from a novel by Wiseman, to The Prowler, Eve, and Accident, saying: “It deals with an impossible domestic situation in which a bourgeois life encases people and they don't get out of it” (Ciment 1985, 341). True enough, but it also differs from the films Losey compares it to, particularly in tone, for The Romantic Englishwoman is a kind of high-wire act, treading a fine line with its shifting tones always threatening to upset a precarious balance. In its attitudes toward its characters, the film comes close to reflecting the detachment Losey was often accused of, but that is a function of its reflexivity, its self-knowing wit, rather than mere distance on Losey's part. A self-conscious commentary on its own narrative strategies is as much a deliberate theme of the film as those that arise from its story. The principal characters include a wealthy popular novelist, Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine), his frustrated but adventurous wife, Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson), on whom he projects relentless fantasies of betrayal, and the handsome, mysterious young foreigner, Thomas Hursa (Helmut Berger), who intrudes on their uneasy marriage at Lewis's all too perverse invitation.