Accident [1967]

 Four years after exiled American filmmaker Joseph Losey had joined hands with British playwright Harold Pinter for the explosive The Servant, they teamed up for Accident, the second of their renowned trilogy of collaborations (they’d work together again on the marvellous The Go-Between). A barbed, smouldering and formally rigorous examination of brittle masculinity, sexual rivalry, abuse of power and dysfunctional bourgeois relationships, this was Losey’s distinctive turn to the “arthouse” aesthetics associated with continental European filmmakers like Antonioni, Resnais and Chabrol. The duo constructed this adaptation of Nicholas Mosley’s novel through delicate interplay between formal exactitude and freewheeling progression, and between minimalist expressions and emotional tumult, while depicting midlife crises, repressed desires, simmering jealousies, and the way that these shockingly unfold (reminding me of Roeg and Saura). It begins with a fatal car accident, and the screenplay – clinically pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle – reveals what preceded that through intricate flashback sequences. Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) is an eerily composed Oxford tutor, living in an idyllic country house with his wife (Vivien Merchant), who’s pregnant with their third child. All’s not well, unfortunately, beneath their seemingly banal and contented life, as he’s become infatuated with his ravishing Austrian student Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), who’s being romantically pursued by a fellow student while having a furtive affair with Stephen’s colleague Charley (Stanley Baker). He’s envious of Charley’s adulterous fling as well as his TV appearances, that leads him to a former lover (Delphine Seyrig) and an ugly transgression after the said accident. This brilliantly photographed film, accompanied by a jazz score, carried a discomfiting “life-imitating-art” subtext as Merchant was then in a disintegrating marriage to Pinter on account of his open infidelity.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Marriage Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: English

Country: UK