THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
PASSING FANTASIES THE SCREEN Joseph Losey's The Romantic Englishwoman begins with a shot of its title character, Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson), reflected in the window of a train. Though we don't...
...One of Lewis's friends is a film director played by a Losey look-alike...
...The faceless man caresses her throat, her leg emerges from beneath her evening gown, etc...
...Thomas's mere presence therefore fulfills a kind of symmetrical pattern in Lewis and Elizabeth's relationship...
...But the cage-like similarity of the elevator and the greenhouse gives us a strong sense of deja vu...
...Finally, however, Lewis and Elizabeth's marriage has about it a kind of harmony and balance that restore themselves...
...Whatever recrimination or further jealousy may follow, we see that Thomas is what Losey has presented him to be: a passing fancy...
...It ii also not the only time in the film's opening sequences that Elizabeth appears to us as an illusion, a mere figment...
...It occurs not in Baden-Baden in a hotel elevator, but at Lewis's own home, and outside, in a greenhouse in the middle of the lawn where Elizabeth tried to make love to Lewis earlier...
...When he arrives at Baden-Baden, for instance, Thomas eats off a serving cart in the hotel park a meal he has stolen from room service, and in a way this fugitive meal anticipates something that happens when Elizabeth returns home to Lewis several scenes later...
...It is a shot which makes us understand right from the start that we are not going to know what to make of this woman...
...Such people exist in Lewis and Elizabeth's world-and Losey's-the way a character might exist in one of Lewis's novels, as a romantic fantasy not really to be believed...
...As the reflection superimposes her on the scenery outside the train, Elizabeth appears to us as an apparition...
...While Lewis torments himself over and over with this fantasy, Elizabeth's real activities remain obscured from our view...
...What Losey does is to make Thomas's life into a strange shadow, or at times a foreshadowing, of Lewis and Elizabeth's life...
...Thomas's appeal is that he is a perpetual outsider, as that eating scene in the park suggests...
...The point of the parallel Losey creates between the two scenes is that Elizabeth seems to yearn for the sort of precariousness and insecurity that Thomas's life represents...
...Though we don't know then that the train is taking her to the resort of Baden-Baden, and that she has left her husband to go there, we can tell that she is in an uncertain, vague and troubled state...
...But it is Lewis's career, not his own, that Losey has brought Thomas to this house to throw out...
...Thomas caresses her throat just as in Lewis's fantasy, her leg wriggles out from under her gown, and her face assumes an erotic expression the same as that in a photograph Lewis has by his writing desk upstairs...
...He is like a demon who enters their lives solely to embody their own malaise and discontent, and Losey treats him accordingly...
...colin l. westerbeck, jr...
...What he imagines is her having at it in an elevator with some gigolo of the type that women go to Baden-Baden to acquire...
...Soon his demonic presence in Elizabeth's home has her doing the same thing, tossing Lewis's current manuscript out the window of his garret study into the rain like Thomas's heroin...
...All the exchanges between Lewis's life and Elizabeth's, between inside and outside, illusion and reality, come together in the film when Lewis's jealous fantasy about his wife and Thomas at last comes true...
...Events have come full circle now, and despite the infidelity that is about to occur before Lewis's eyes, the peculiar symmetry of his life with Elizabeth has been restored...
...Finding Lewis out on her return, Elizabeth waits for him that night in the side yard and seduces him right then and there before he can even get her back into the house...
...And Losey knows that in this elegant, monted world, an interloper like Thomas is himself an illusion...
...As surely as Thomas's affair with Elizabeth is a figment of Lewis's imagination, Thomas himself is in this movie a mere figment of Lewis and Elizabeth's marriage...
...Despite the obvious disingenuousness of Thomas's flattery, Lewis is even more readily and completely seduced by him than Elizabeth was, and it is at Lewis's insistence that Thomas stays on in their home for a prolonged visit...
...But Losey only gives us a receding glimpse of what transpires between them, the camera fixed atop the elevator shaft and peering down through the grillwork in the roof of the car as the car descends but of sight...
...This world so embroiled in its own fantasies, the world of a best-selling writer like Lewis, is one that Losey knows well...
...This is precisely what keeps happening, too, when Thomas shows up on Lewis and Elizabeth's doorstep as an uninvited house guest...
...When Thomas does try to make love to Elizabeth, the incident realizes and yet also mirror-images Lewis's fantasy...
...Thomas embodies that impulse to throw one's responsibilities, or somebody else's, out the window...
...And as in the reflection of her in the train window, which serves as an establishing shot for Losey's whole film, so in the scene where she tries to seduce Lewis, Elizabeth herself becomes literally (or rather, figuratively) an outsider as well...
...As she is on her way to Baden-Baden, her novelist husband Lewis (Michael Caine) is home in London wondering what she's up to...
...but then he becomes so impatient with it, he throws it out a train window before he arrives...
...Now it is Lewis who is in an abstracted and apparitional state, for as he peers down at his wife and her lover, we see only his face reflected in his study window like hers in the train at the beginning...
...Lewis and Elizabeth must get back together again in the end...
...He is there because he threw his own responsibilities out a window, carelessly stashing heroin he was transporting outside a window of the hotel in Baden-Baden so that it washed away in a storm...
...The situation is turn-about, and turn-about is fair play in their world...
...It has a symmetry like that which exists in a mirror image between the subject and its reflection in the glass...
...Floating pale and undisturbed over the hurtling landscape, she is so indistinct and dislocated a figure that she at once becomes a woman of mystery...
...Thinking to ingratiate himself with flattery, Thomas buys one of Lewis's novels en route to England...
...It is a world in which people's illusions about each other obstruct our view of their reality, and in which their illusions about themselves eclipse reality the way Elizabeth's wavering reflection in the train window eclipses the landscape outside...
...Indeed, from this opening shot we have a more forceful impression even than that...
...However enigmatic Elizabeth may remain for us, though, we do begin to understand something of the world in which she lives...
...She does in fact take up with a gigolo, Thomas (Helmut Berger), and he does make a move for her when he gets her alone in a hotel elevator...
...Now the gangsters are after him...
...Thomas is a shady character, a reckless opportunist who sometimes smuggles heroin when he is in between women...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 2
