Like all of Joseph Losey's films, Accident (1967) is bold and unconventional. Fortunately, it lands on the positive side of that erratic filmmaker's ledger. Reteaming with favored collaborators Harold Pinter and Dirk Bogarde, he crafts an unnerving psycho-portrait of repressed entitlement. Middle-aged Oxford tutor Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) becomes enamored of two of his students, aristocratic William (Michael York) and Austrian beauty Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), who are dating each other. Stephen grows obsessed with Anna, but restraints himself from making overt advances for the sake of his pregnant wife Rosalind (Vivien Merchant). Then Stephen finds his colleague Charley (Stanley Baker) together with Anna, driving him to further anguish and despair.
Based on Nicholas Mosley's novel, Accident goes beyond The Servant in its passive-aggressive dramaturgy. Pinter trades in banal menace, putting the same level of malice into word play as others invest in murder. Stephen, Charley and others talk past each other, exchanging small talk through tones conveying toxic hostility. Stephen reads a story to his children and Rosalind worries about being unattractive, followed by a smash cut to Anna gnawing a pencil. Or when Stephen's television interview is preempted by a producer's death; he sits dumbfounded as the studio chiefs chat over top of him.
Pinter's Seinfeld-meets-Brecht approach can exhaust if mishandled, as with William Friedkin's tedious adaptation of The Birthday Party. Fortunately, Losey enhances our alienation with studied, distancing direction. Gerry Fisher's photography relishes wide shots and long takes, often with ambient sound: the film's bookended by shots of Stephen's house with sounds from the titular car crash looped in. Other highlights include an endless party where Stephen, Charley and William vomit their neuroses into whiskey, a tense cricket match (prefiguring The Go-Between), a strange improvised rugby game, a haunting shot of William and Anna entombed in shattered glass.Both Losey and Pinter achieve apotheosis when Stephen pursues a tryst with his old flame Francesca (Delphine Seyrig). The two dine and make love silently, set to John Dankworth's unnerving string score, their voiceovers swirling overhead as if engaging in psychic dialog. Owing much to Last Year in Marienbad, this mesmerizing sequence emphasizes the disconnect between characters' actions and inner thoughts. Barely alluded to afterwards, it plays like a dream, with Stephen returning to an older, simpler relationship without entanglements or consequences.
Such is Stephen's dilemma: emotionally constipated and depressed, he's unable to wring enjoyment out of work or his private life. His affectionate wife and kids offer no release, but he lacks the gumption to carry out his plans for seduction. Charley's an uninhibited foil, succeeding where Stephen fails: he seduces Anna (in Stephen's house, wearing his bathrobe, no less!), lands a television show, casually discussing sex with colleagues as Stephen cringes. William's energy swims with doubts about his usefulness as a landed aristocrat studying philosophy, redeemed mainly by his youth. Better callow and silly than ancient and ossified.
Stephen's inability to face emotions drives the denouement. Having rescued Anna from an accident (William is already dead), he chats with police and takes her into a bedroom. Anna, having shed her colorful fashionista dress for virginal white, lays catatonic as Stephen mutters questions into her ear. Unable to elicit a response, he forces himself upon Anna. It's a mad, desperate act, disgusting and tragic: having suppressed himself so long, he acts out in the most inappropriate context, in the worst possible way. To say nothing of Anna, who immediately packs up for Austria, unwilling to subject herself to Stephen and Charley's macho gamesmanship any longer.Dirk Bogarde plays to his strengths, suggesting currents of despair and torment beneath a glacial front. It rivals Bogarde's work on The Servant and Victim as his best performance. Stanley Baker is equally effective in swaggering counterpoint, while Michael York provides cheerful energy suggesting its own misdirection. Female characters aren't so well-served: Jacqueline Sassard smolders endearingly while offering little personality, while Delphine Seyrig's restricted to a cameo. Vivien Merchant fares better: Rosalind seems fully aware of the tempest in her husband's head, yet can't bring him to face it. Harold Pinter has a fleeting cameo in the TV studio.
Accident calls to mind, of all things, American Beauty, another tale of a middle-aged, middle class man enraptured by a teenager and driven to self-destruct. Where that movie flounders in aureate archness and overreaching pretension, Accident hits the perfect note of angry alienation. You'll be puzzling its rich, despairing portraiture long after the credits roll.
