The Romantic Englishwoman

A lifeless, directionless, confused, resentful, unengaging and unamusing exploration of something or other that seems specific to its time, which is to say that the filmmakers obviously felt they were offering some kind of critique of contemporary (that is, “bourgeois”) life bearing some kind of significance. Kolker seems to at least half buy it, but at a distance of half a century this viewer definitely couldn’t (and neither could Kael at the time, whose sarcastic judgment was that “Losey is deep on the surface” – Kael, 1980, p. 94). Here’s what the former thought this film was about (Kolker, 1983, p. 275):

“What would bourgeois life be without its compensations? Losey and his screenwriters, Tom Stoppard and Thomas Wiseman, confront a question basic to all middle-class, left-wing intellectuals, that of finding alternatives to the life they themselves lead and at the same time find abhorrent, particularly when placed in a wider cultural-political context. The elements of middle-class life – order, security, predictability; the freedom, within defined limits, to act and think independently; the cultivation of individuality; ’honesty, scrupulousness, discrimination, protectiveness, tenderness, aversion to violence and the conscious practice of terror’ (qualities catalogued by a character in Resnais’s PROVIDENCE) – are so deeply inscribed as to be almost impossible to erase. They may be mocked and excoriated, they may be examined in a global context and seen to be limited and even dangerous when forced upon societies that have other needs and values. But when examined at home, within the domenstic unit, they are almost impossible to reject – on moral if not political grounds. Sometimes they can only be examined by being stripped away, exposing a vulnerability of feelings and a desperate need for the security that bourgeois values were created to protect.“