Sight and Sound – Spring 1967
Two Films [ 1 ] Accident
by Tom Milne
THIRD TIME LUCKY, as they say. For if Muriel and La Guerre est Finie were rather less than fairly treated by the critics, Accident has been justly acclaimed as masterly in its exploration, through a dislocated time structure, of the turbulent emotions lying unspoken and unperceived beneath a calm surface. Not that Losey is content simply to follow Resnais: making graceful acknowledgment of his debt, he pushes even further along these new paths. In Accident there is no mysterious lover from the past, no haunting loyalty for a lost cause, to lend dramatic echoes to the situation: simply a banal incident, involving more or less banal people, whose clipped, glancing conversation is never of the slightest apparent consequence. And Losey’s style is all his own: a return to the simplicity of his early films, with the later baroque splendours still lending their riches, but reduced to order by firmness of line. Starting with an accident and ending with its echo, constructed out of a chain of interlocking emotions which lead right back where they started from, gradually generating a beam of light to illuminate the central situation before it dies away again, Accident is as simple, as bafflingly perfect – and as difficult to take apart – as a circle.
“All you need is a starting point. Here, for instance, on this lawn,” says Charley (Stanley Baker) in one of the key scenes, the long, lazy summer afternoon when the characters are almost provoked into burning their social boats in speech. So all right, let’s start on the lawn. Five adults (and two children) pottering happily about on a hot, endless summer Sunday, probably not thinking about anything in particular: the youthfully middle-aged Oxford don, Stephen (Dirk Bogarde), who would like to be having an affair with one of his pupils, the beautiful Austrian student Anna; his wife Rosalind (Vivien Merchant), contentedly pregnant, but still lazily watchful; his friend Charley who, unknown to him, is in fact having an affair with Anna; another pupil, William (Michael York), who is going to marry Anna; and Anna herself (Jacqueline Sassard), something of an enigma, not exactly throwing herself at Stephen’s head, but obviously interested.
Suddenly, while casually describing these people basking on the lawn as part of his explanation of the process of observation which goes into writing a novel, Charley shatters the air of drowsy serenity – ” … and Stephen is having an affair with a girl at Oxford.” Maybe a joke, maybe not, but no one cares to pick it up, and after an embarrassed pause, serenity returns and the afternoon continues as before. But not quite as before. Charley’s remark has radiated secretly, and the casual round of tea, tennis and strolling conversation now conceals an alert, growing sexual competition as, wordlessly and almost unaware of what they are doing to each other, the three men begin to fight for Anna.
These people are all friends, civilised, comfortable and urbane, capable of assessing their own behaviour and of attributing reasonably accurate motives to the others; but between them lie dark areas which they do not recognise, abrasions on a cool surface. When Charley, for instance, becomes aware of the electricity sparked off by his remark, and adds to it by calling to Stephen to ask if he has heard, is he conscious of the real extent of his malice? Equally, when Stephen mutters ‘yes’ as he bends busily over the flower-bed he is weeding, and his wife’s voice echoes ‘YES!’ with quizzical clarity from another part of the lawn, is she aware that she is striking a match under Stephen’s smouldering guilt? The remarkable thing about the film is that one can interpret the characters and their motives almost any way one likes. Charley, for example, may know that Stephen is attracted by Anna; or his remark may merely have been a shot in the dark; or it may even have been a wry joke at his own expense. One never really knows which. But the point is, here as throughout the film, that what matters is not the remark (situation, emotion, gesture) itself, but the way it brings new, unexpected facets to light.
* * *
The signs are discreetly posted for us in the opening shot, as the camera stares motionlessly at the façade of Stephen’s house. The night is dark, a plane passes overhead, a bird cries, a typewriter chatters faintly inside, and the camera begins to track slowly towards the house, away from the roar of an approaching car which gradually splinters to a screeching crash. Unexpectedly, the camera continues tracking forward steadily, almost wilfully oblivious, until the front door opens and Stephen emerges to investigate. The accident in which William is killed, in other words, is one thing; what Stephen makes of it is another. And this distinction is underlined by the sense of abrasion between sound and image. First, the peaceful contemplation of the house shattered by the sounds of the crash; then the dreamlike quiet of the two bodies lying in the car, shattered by the sound of Stephen’s shoes scraping harshly on the metal sides, his voice grating on the still air.
Brilliantly shot to accentuate the atmosphere of bewilderment and mystery (rapid track along a grassy verge, passing footsteps, inset shots of startled horse and pale moon glaring down), the accident is made to seem a key. And Stephen, after his initial guilt about William’s death (“Don’t! You’re standing on his face!”), takes it as such, building round it a drama which will bring Anna to him. He assumes she was driving, shelters her from the police, and then makes love to her, tacitly expecting her to respond. In fact there is no mystery about the accident, it is a key to nothing. Anna leaves for home because William is dead and there is nothing left for her in Oxford; if there are darker, more secret reasons for her departure – her disillusionment with both Charley and Stephen – these were settled long before the accident.
Losey makes this clear in two ways. First, by his demystification of the accident. The last shot of the film, which in a way brings it full circle, is again of the façade of the house, by daylight this time, as the front door closes, a dog runs down the drive to the road, and a car crashes. Seen in broad daylight (no moon, no horse, no shadows), the accident is simply an accident; and by implication the only fact of the first accident is that William dies. Secondly, there is the aftermath of the scene on the lawn. By snubbing William and accepting Stephen’s invitation to go for a walk, Anna has made her intentions as plain as she can. But Stephen is still held back by his inhibitions, and nothing happens. Their hands rest on a gate, close but not touching; after a time, as though giving up, Anna says “Shall we go back?” And as they turn back to the house, the camera stays where it is, gazing at the empty landscape as though lamenting the end of the affair. It is, in fact, the end. The next time Stephen meets Anna is when he returns unexpectedly from London to find her sleeping with Charley; and the time after that she announces her engagement to William. The accident is merely a postscript to a chapter already closed.
The strange, hypnotic quality in this shot of an empty landscape suffuses the whole film, so that as one watches scene after scene unfolding in the serene stillness of an Oxford summer, one is constantly made to sense the extraordinary beneath the ordinary. A shot of a man standing in the distance with a raised umbrella on a bright sunny day contains an indescribable charge of latent menace. It is only later that one realises why, when we discover that the man is Stephen, that the umbrella is a protection against garden sprinklers, and that he is nerving himself to face Charley’s distraught wife, Laura, who is being driven mad with grief and jealousy. But the charge works both ways: Laura, in her unsuitable black oilskins, becomes identified with the black figure poised against the house with raised umbrella, awkward and out of place, deprived of any sense of belonging.
The film is studded with these strange, apparently meaningless shots, which hover indelibly in the mind until they are completed (it is only later, for instance, that one realises that the long-held shot over the gate marks the last moment at which Stephen might have achieved happiness with Anna). Here one comes up interestingly against the question of time in the film. Although the main body of the action is a flashback – or rather, a series of flashbacks – occasioned by the accident and describing Stephen’s recollection of the events which led up to it, the time sequence appears to be fairly simple. With one exception, the various scenes are recalled in logical (and almost certainly chronological) sequence, as in a conventional narrative. And the exception – the intercutting of Stephen’s visit to Laura with his visit to his own wife after she has gone to stay with her mother – is again perfectly logical: the scenes with Laura are conjured in his mind as he talks to his wife. Time is allowed to be sequential, but on other levels is completely annihilated.
* * *
Twice during the course of the film, a clock chimes out, and at each stroke the camera marks time derisively by jumping along a row of grinning gargoyles on the college wall. Elsewhere, climactic points – Stephen’s return home from London to find Charley and Anna sleeping together, his departure from the college after Anna has left to catch her plane – are marked by insistently chiming clocks which seek to place their seal on things. But in this story, nothing can be defined or limited in this way. An emotion exists independently of time, perhaps remaining constant, perhaps growing weaker or stronger as more illumination is thrown on it. William’s jealousy of Stephen, for instance, is most clearly illuminated during the Eton-type wall game at his aristocratic home, when his light emphasis of “I think you should go in goal” indicates that he is assigning the most dangerous position to his rival; but the same jealousy, dark, unconscious, and as yet without illumination, exists much earlier, before he has even met Anna, when he refuses to let Stephen effect an introduction.
A more complex instance comes in the sequence with Francesca, the old flame whom Stephen looks up during his visit to London for a television interview. Here the illumination is not exterior (fed by external events or actions) but purely interior. From the way her name is introduced by the man at the TV studio in a sort of cross-talk act (“Do you ever see Francesca? The Provost’s daughter? The daughter of the Provost?”), one is led to expect something hard and sharp, a sort of part-time college whore, perhaps; later, this impression is strengthened by Rosalind’s indifference and the Provost’s knowing leer. But in fact the scenes of their evening together have a tender, candle-lit quality, a dream of pure romance, as Francesca (Delphine Seyrig) flits gracefully to and fro in her room, or is seen shimmering through a delicately rain-spotted restaurant window. The accompanying dialogue, much more down-to-earth (“I’m in consumer research, did you know?”) and much more strained in its quest for romance (“You don’t look a day older” – “Oh really? I’m ten years older”), is significantly dissociated from the images, as though it had nothing whatsoever to do with them. In recollecting this scene, Stephen is obviously creating the perfect romance, an amalgam perhaps of his first love for Francesca, his love for his wife, the love he hopes for with Anna.
The feeling that this sequence is fabricated in recollection by Stephen for his own pleasure is increased by the fact that, whereas the rest of the film is shot with a diamond-sharp clarity, the Francesca scenes have much softer, gauzier tones. By extension, therefore, the scene in the TV studio – at first glance the only unsatisfactory one in the film because it feels like a Losey-Pinter self-parody – is also fabricated: its thin, two-dimensional texture, its note of hysteria, is the way Stephen remembers it, as something grotesque, best left unexplored. In it one finds none of the tiny, indefinable details which lend their weight to the texture of the rest of the film: the automatic gesture with which Stephen pushes the rocking-horse as he passes on the way to the room where Anna has been sleeping with Charley; the sudden flood of light as a cloud passes over at the start of his walk with Anna; the abrupt stutter by the train which has been puffing away steadily in the distance during the accident.
In a way, of course, being Stephen’s recollection, the whole film (with the exception, naturally, of the accident and last scenes) is his fabrication, with Charley being beastly, Anna provocative, Rosalind patient, and William callow. (It is interesting, in fact, to note the disparity between the dignified, hesitant Stephen of the flashbacks, and the man who virtually rapes Anna after the accident.) But the characters refuse to be limited by what we are shown of them. The whole film is put together virtually without transitions, using only direct cuts, and as with Resnais, it is in the gaps that the real story is told.
Stephen’s whole situation, for instance, his fear of sinking into staid middle-age, is conveyed in the cuts linking three brief scenes: from Rosalind at home (jokingly saying “I’m not too old for you”) to a languorous Anna in his study (“Write me an essay on what the problem seems to you”), to the dons’ common-room (with the Provost preparing to launch yet again into his pet story). Similarly but more obliquely, the intercutting of Stephen’s visits to Rosalind and Laura effects a curious kind of osmosis between the two women: Laura, distraught but struggling to conceal it, evokes the tension which must lie beneath Rosalind’s air of calm competence. Further: this osmosis (if that is the word) is only complete when one adds to it the identification made earlier between Rosalind and Anna and which has since been hanging fire (the scene in which Stephen is deceived by the hem of a dressing-gown whisking out of sight into thinking that Rosalind is Anna; and its complement when he discovers Anna on his staircase, dressed exactly like Rosalind). If the Francesca sequence is a male dream of love fulfilled, the film also adumbrates a female dream of love betrayed.
More, perhaps, than any other Losey film, with its bland surface being invisibly gnawed away from within, Accident forces one to look and look again, to make connections where none are apparent. Perfectly served by his entire cast (invidious to single out names, but Stanley Baker and Vivien Merchant are miraculously good), by his designer (Carmen Dillon), cameraman (Gerry Fisher) and scriptwriter (Pinter), Losey has made a film in which nothing is signalled, nothing given away. As with Muriel, you have to do your share of the work, watching patiently and absorbedly as the characters live their lives, cook their omelettes, exchange their trivial chat, and rewarded almost constantly by the moments of glittering illumination.
