‘The Romantic Age’ is ahead of its time in its depiction of an inappropriate affair between Arnold Dixon (Hugh Williams), a stern, detached, traditionalist middle aged teacher at a girls’ school in 1940s England and the French pupil, Arlette (Mai Zetterling), who nearly costs him his marriage and his job by pretending to fall in love while her motives are far from felicitous.

This movie, featuring a teenage Petula Clark as the daughter of the teacher, presents and dissects the role of the femme fatale in a manner which doesn’t feel all that far removed from the world of ‘Body Heat’ or ‘Basic Instinct’ in terms of giving us a motive-led woman who has strategic and short-term plans to take revenge on the teacher who had humiliated her for her behaviour in class, and who then walks away from the prank once she has succeeded in pushing the boundary as far as she can.

As with ‘Fatal Attraction’ some four decades later, ‘The Romantic Age’ is a treatise on the role of family and whether the family unit can withstand an external incursion (it can), and whether there are any reprisals for the individual responsible for striking a blow against the sanctity of the nuclear family. The latter is handled in a muddled, and trite manner, which is perhaps why this film is relatively unknown and largely unreviewed. The end scene sees the girl’s butler teaching her a lesson by giving her a spanking, a course of action which is awkwardly played for laughs and decidedly unfunny by the standards of 2025.

The film is insightful for the way in which it tries to get to grips with questions of deceit and infidelity, but it doesn’t really transgress too many boundaries – and Dixon does not convince as the uninhibited playboy to which he is transformed during the middle act, who makes night journeys to the home of Arlette on the premise of giving her additional tuition and both conceals it from his wife and fully admits to it when she enquires as to whether he might have been unfaithful.

A momentary lapse, and then the full restitution of the lost unit, while the female aggressor is (literally) spanked. There are many leaps of faith required in this fascinating but flawed expression of English boarding school noir.