Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

SnoopyStyle 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.

maurice yacowar 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."

jotix100 Not having seen "The Romantic Englishwoman" before, we got the opportunity as it was shown on a classical movie channel recently. Its pedigree showed a lot of talent went into the production of this movie. First of all, Joseph Losey, as a director, then the screenplay written by Tom Stoppard with Thomas Wiseman, the author of the original novel, and last a cast that included Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, so could be wrong?Lewis, the writer, is apparently blocked. His new novel is taking place in his mind as well as some of the action appears on the screen. It involves Lewis' wife, Elizabeth interacting with a man that she met at the luxurious Brenner Park Hotel and the Baden-Baden casino where a bored Elizabeth goes to get away from it all. Elizabeth is surprised as she finds Thomas, the stranger she met on the train. The novel follows loosely the novel which Lewis is trying to write. What went on at the posh resort, suddenly changes, when Thomas suddenly decides to try England for a change of pace. Thomas deals in drugs, but obviously has no clue as where to hide the powdery substance in a drain pipe of the hotel. Lewis is intrigued with the prospect of having Thomas close by inviting him to stay with him as a personal secretary, infuriating Elizabeth, before she finally falls for the visitor's charms. Boredom is an element for most of the rich set around Lewis and Elizabeth, something the author cannot take. Things become a bit difficult for Thomas, who decides to leave for the Continent taking Elizabeth along, who by then has become involved with the younger man. Because of Thomas drug problem it does not take too long before the people he cheated get a hold of him, thus ending Elizabeth fascination with this pseudo poet man.This is not one of the best efforts by the distinguish director Joseph Losey. His triumphs in films like "The Servant", "Mr. Klein", "The Go Between" and other more successful films, are not reflected in this one. There are hints of his talent. The elegance he always brought to his work is present here. The posh interiors in most of the film are prominently shown. One would have wished to have seen a better copy of this film in which the emphasis is luxury in contrast with the shallowness of the character of Thomas, who uses older women in order to survive.The best thing in the film is Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth. She is a complex character with needs and desires overlooked by her husband. Feeling she is the object of Thomas' interest makes her see him in a more romantic way. Michael Caine is always a welcome presence in any film where he decides to appear. Helmut Berger's Thomas practically derail the picture. Maybe another actor would have been more credible than him. Kate Nelligan is totally wasted, even though she has top billing.

MARIO GAUCI From the film's title and credits, I had assumed it would be a hysterical melodrama but, in general, I was pleasantly surprised by the result! As expected from this director, it's a stylish film but not an easy one: in fact, it's been likened to Alain Resnais' LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961) - though it's not quite that mystifying! Still, the plot does blur the confines which separate fact from fiction, especially in the way novelist/screenwriter Michael Caine bases the affair between a man and a woman who meet while on holiday in a foreign city - and which we see enacted from time to time - on the one he suspects went on between his wife (Glenda Jackson) and a young German gigolo (Helmut Berger) in Baden-Baden. The latter, however, is not as naïve and innocuous as he seems to be; apart from being a crook, when invited by Caine to England, he insinuates himself into the couple's household: charming the nanny who takes care of their child, intriguing the apprehensive Caine (playing a character named Lewis Fielding, whereupon Berger presents himself as an admirer citing "Tom Jones" as his favorite novel - actually written by Henry Fielding!) but who still makes him his secretary, while Jackson is annoyed and evidently uncomfortable with the whole tension-filled set-up.The three stars are excellent, but Caine's character is especially interesting; curiously enough, when presented with the idea for his script, he finds it boring and proposes to change it into a suspenser but, after realizing that the drama held greater resonance for him than he had anticipated, he is unaware of the parallel thriller subplot wherein Berger falls foul of his criminal associates (led by the smooth Michel Lonsdale)! The cast also features Rene' Kolldehoff (as Caine's extravagant producer), Nathalie Delon (severely underused, despite her "Guest Artist" credit) and Kate Nelligan (as a gossipmonger friend of the Fieldings).The script by Tom Stoppard and Thomas Wiseman (from the latter's novel) is actually very funny, particularly Caine's explosive put-down of Nelligan on her very first appearance (though when Jackson eventually leaves him for Berger, she goes to see how he's doing and they make up), a society dinner in which Caine ends up drunk and Delon is mistaken for a hooker and, again, Caine's close encounter with gangster Lonsdale. Here, Losey also does some interesting things with his camera (Gerry Fisher was the cinematographer) and Richard Hartley's score is notable, too.I've only watched this and MR. KLEIN (1976) from Losey's final period (1972-85), during which there were evident signs of decline; even if overlong and emerging, ultimately, as a lesser work, the film is more enjoyable - and rewarding - than could be gleaned from a mere reading of its synopsis...