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!
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!