84
JONATHAN BAUMBACH
Losey's films have gotten increasingly literary. I don't mean the
word
literary
here in a pejorative sense, merely to describe the
nature of Losey's aspirations as an artist.
Accident,
the second of
his collaborations with Harold Pinter, a highly literary and elegant
film, seems to me the director's most fully realized and beautiful
work. Pinter's obliqueness and economy -- no secret, this-–
complement Losey's densely textured visual language.
Despite the controversy about "what it means" that greeted
Accident's
appearance (which is like looking behind the screen to
see if something is hidden there), the movie is perfectly simple
t~
follow. The accident, the sound of it, frames the narrative, which
is presented to us through flashback ostensibly through the recol–
lection of Stephen (Dirk Bogarde), an Oxford don just turned
forty and going through some kind of life crisis. Two students of
Stephen's, William and Anna, coming to see him late at night after
a party, crash their car down the road from his house. William is
killed and Anna, who mayor may not have been driving, is in
apparent shock. The recollection of prior events is set off in
Stephen by the image of Anna stepping on the dead William's face.
What may make
Accident
seem obscure to a viewer concerned
with "meaning" is a certain obliqueness in the connections be–
tween events, a highly evocative and concentrated visual style, and
the difficulty of attributing rpotives for much of the behavior.
There is no "meaning" to the accident. As it is with accidents, it
happens.
The film admits to almost every possible configuration in the
relationships of the characters. Stephen's rivalry (and identifica–
tion) with his somewhat more successful friend, Charley (Stanley
Baker), who is a novelist and television personality, is one of the
central configurations. Stephen's involvement with his two pupils,
William and Anna, another. Anna, it seems, is interested in William
because he is Stephen's student and in Charley because he is
Stephen's friend, Stephen the interlocutor in both relationships.
Stephen, wanting to sleep with Anna, only partly aware of his
motives, turns her over to William (surrogate and rival, son, other
self) and to Charley (he puts a copy of Charley's novel in her
purse -- a fine Losey touch), with whom identification is even
more profound.
If
Stephen uses Charley and William as extensions
