The Romantic Englishwoman

'Return to Losey Country' might be a more suitable title for The Romantic Englishwoman, in which Caine plays a prestigious novelist whose wife (Jackson) feeds his jealous fantasies by slipping off to Baden Baden for the weekend. The two play out their trapped games, prior to a highly romanticised intrusion from Helmut Berger, amid an opulence so mannered and preposterous that it verges on self-parody; in fact, the familiar icy excess of Richard MacDonald's set matches the pomposity of the characters. Most of the film is passably entertaining, and Tom Stoppard's dialogue has its moments, but the basic material contains less that is real or relevant about it than the flimsiest of romantic melodramas.