PARTISAN REVIEW
85
of himself, he is also used by them as invisible third party in their
separate involvements with Anna.
Stephen goes to bed with an old girl friend, Francesca, be–
cause he wants to make love to Anna but is too timid. He comes
home from his unhappy affair -- Stephen's pregnant wife and
children away temporarily -- to find Charley in his house, in his
dressing gown in fact, having an affair with Anna.
It
is an extra–
ordinary scene -- the discovery of his other self acting out his
unadmitted desires like something dreamed. He is hungry when he
sees Charley and Anna, another displaced feeling, and makes
himself an omelet. Charley starts to eat Stephen's egg as if it were
his. AnI).a reminds him that he said he didn't want an egg. The two
men seem for the moment more involved with one another than
with Anna.
Accident
is full of such correspondences. Earlier, Charley,
talking to William on the lawn at Stephen's house, narrates the
plot of a novel that might be made out of the lives of the people
around them. The story he tells is his own -- a restless don having
an affair with a student -- although he
attri~utes
it to Stephen.
The story told loudly enough for Stephen's wife to hear is an act
in
one sense of hostility, in another of disguise, in another of dis–
placed confession. I don't mean to belabor the point, only to
indicate the significance of confused identity in the film. Char–
acters in
Accident
offer themselves through surrogates to each
other.
Displaced behavior gives the film a certain surrealistic or
dreamlike ambience.
In
love with Charley apparently, Anna
announces to Stephen that she is going to marry William, asking
Stephen to break the news to Charley. It's not that behavior in
Accident
is without credible motive, but that its charge, its refer–
ence point is elsewhere, so that we get the impression of observing
a world slightly off-center. Somewhat earlier in the film, Stephen
watches a cricket match where Anna's two lovers, William and
Charley, take turns at bat. The scene, if it were merely symbolic, a
definition of Stephen's role as vicarious spectator, would seem a
heavy-handed device. The cricket, however, is beautifully detailed
and exciting in itself, enriched for us like a sly joke by its
suggestiveness.
