86
JONATHAN BAUMBACH
We hear the sound of the crash at the end, the film coming
full circle, suggesting, or meaning to suggest, that Stephen will
have to live with the accident, for which he bears a certain implied
responsibility, for the rest of his life. The ending underestimates
the complication of the film's experience. Moreover, it seems con–
ventionally moralistic as if the film were saying that Stephen, who
has rescued and slept with Anna and triumphed (in a sense, cer–
tainly) over his two rivals, Charley and
Willia~,
hasn't wholly
gotten away with it. Stephen, as Bogarde plays him, as opposed to
the self-deceived, decent narrator of the Nicholas Mosley novel, is
a devious and secretive man, insidious at times, deeply competi–
tive, never precisely in touch with himself. His sleeping with Anna
after the accident, which is not in the novel, somewhere on the
spectrum between extortion and rape, whatever else its moral
shadings, is one of the few acts Stephen performs in the film
directly on his own behalf.. The very neatness of the resolution,
and I think
The Go-Between
makes a similar tactical error, serves
to deny the larger mystery of the work, translating metaphor into
literalness.
If
Accident
is the ultimate Losey film, an occasion to give
form and vision to his deepest concerns,
A Doll's House
seems a
rather grudging project. What interested Losey about Ibsen's play?
Clearly, since he does away with much of the play's vaunted
dramaturgy, it is not Ibsen's technique of illuminating the present
through gradual revelations of the past. The question of women's
freedom?
In
perhaps the same way the exile of Trotsky interested
him. Losey often achieves texture by working in subtle and
sympathetic opposition to his ostensible subject. Much of the
time, and this seems to me one of the most interesting aspects
about his meticulously crafted films, his approach subverts the
explicit intention of his subject.
In
A Doll's Hous e,
Losey is in–
terested in the interiors of Nora's house, the winter landscape
particularly as perceived through closed windows, and the parallel
and vicarious relationships of the characters.
A Doll's House
was
also an occasion for Losey - - this mentioned to me in an
interview -- for doing a film with Jane Fonda.
Losey's
A Doll's House
starts with Nora Oane Fonda) and
Kristine (Delphine Seyrig) ice-skating, the scene both exhilarating
