by Douglas Messerli
Those who have regularly read my essays on film, literature,
and theater will know that I often perceive sexual undercurrents (sometimes
gay, but also heterosexual) in works that seem, on the surface, to represent no
such concerns. Fearful that some might find my interest in such issues as
slightly prurient, I have even addressed these readings in my 2012 essay titled
“Reading Sexually Coded Films: A Defense,” which appears in the 1940s volume of
My Queer Cinema. Admittedly, when I review any cultural work I like to
observe the piece from a new perspective, but I also argue that when I do
discuss such sexual issues that they are actually there in the works’ narrative
structures. And my regular readers will also perceive that I do not find these
issues in the majority of works on which I focus.
I had to laugh,
accordingly, after attending a recent performance at Los Angeles’ Royale
Theater of a restored version of Joseph Losey’s 1967 cult favorite, Accident—a movie that has been long
unavailable on DVD, which I had first seen as a student at the University of
Wisconsin soon after its US premiere. In that youthful viewing, during a period
in which I had just become involved in gay sexual activities, I saw the work as
being centered around the film’s handsome young student, William (Michael
York), surrounded by men who sought out his sexual company. In short, in the
foggy lens of my student days, I interrupted this basically heterosexual story
as being primarily gay! Oh, well, we all read, at some time or another,
literary works or life itself through the perspective of personal obsessions.
But my particular
reading, in this instance, seems so absolutely wrong-headed that even now I
blush, as I did when I shared this information with my companion Howard.
Howard, who has often accused me of reading things into works he perceives as
being much more straight-forward, shared my laughter, responding, “That shows
where your mind was.” He paused, “I mean, there were a few moments…but…” his
voice trailing off.
Just for the record, Losey’s Accident features three Oxford males, two dons, Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) and Charley (Stanley Baker), and Stephen’s pupil, William (York), who all lust after another young student whom Stephen tutors, Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), an Austrian whose long full name leads Stephen to describe her as a “princess.” Stephen and Charley, incidentally, are married with children, and both are at the age where, to mitigate their feelings of getting older, they have undertaken—at least in Stephen’s case—tentative and brief lasting affairs. We also meet both long-suffering wives, Rosalind (Vivien Merchant), Stephen’s wife, and Laura (Ann Firbank), Charley’s wife. The film even hints at an attraction, even if never played out, between Charley and Rosalind, and Stephen and Laura (with whom Stephen meets after Charley has left her). Although Stephen, the most morally scrupled of the three, contemplates sex with Anna, he is somewhat appalled when it becomes apparent that Charley has been bedding the young Austrian for some time. William, the young pupil, trumps them both, however, when Anna announces that she is going to marry him. But when, upon driving out to Stephen’s country house, William is killed in a car accident during which Anna has been driving, fate seems to intrude, allowing Stephen (whose wife and children are away) a chance to possess his princess; and in a long, drawn out scene, halfway between a rape and a willing seduction, he appears to succeed, besting not only the poor, dead boy but his best friend. So much for my youthful interpretations!
Most critics
agree, however, that in the Pinter-Losey telling of this tale, nothing is
actually said, only suggested. Indeed, the story I have just repeated is told
entirely in one long flashback, after the occurrence in the first scenes of the
“accident.” And that story is indirectly revealed during several paradisiacal
outings into the Oxford countryside: a long, beautifully filmed, punting down
the Cherwell (or Thames) to which William and Anna have invited the reluctant
don Stephen, and a day-long picnic at Stephen’s beautiful country home, to
which Stephen has invited Anna and William, with the uninvited Charley tagging
along. Throughout these “dinners upon grass,” the figures are splayed out upon
the lush lawns and overlooking the glorious English landscape while they
chatter away in a sometimes-witty dialogue about utterly meaningless things.
Only after the heavy consuming of alcohol do these pleasantries flare up into
anything we might perceive as revelatory; but then, by that time the male characters
speak in a language so slurred and skewed that it is transformed nearly into
nonsense.
This, of course,
is Pinter’s dialogic method, in which his characters in saying little, speak
volumes—even if we cannot quite read the words on those pages. Losey adds to
this a baroque attention to detail, his camera embracing not only the natural
beauty of his scenes but lingering upon seemingly insignificant visual elements
even after the characters have left the room. The musical score, consisting
primarily of the odd combination of two harps and a saxophone, intrude,
sometimes in a jazz mode, at other times registering as emotional statements
that seldom have to do with what has just occurred, and alternates with the
sounds of the university bells and inner creaks and ticking in the quiet Oxford
rooms and environs of wooden floors and clocks. Everything, in short, is poised
to make the viewer suspect something significant has been has just occurred,
even if we cannot imagine what that occurrence has consisted of.
Numerous film
and theater commentators have noted that both Pinter’s and Losey’s works are
male dominated, creating worlds in which the women and their motives remain, at
best, blurred. And certainly, that is the case with Accident. Both director and writer make absolutely no attempt to
explain Anna’s behavior or even suggest why she has taken up with Charley or
wants to marry William—although, at least in the latter case, we can imagine
that she might desire the wealth her marriage with an aristocrat will provide.
Stephen’s wife, Rosalind, lives in quiet forbearance, recognizing, we presume,
that her husband’s brief affairs are not a real challenge to his comfortable
family life. Charley’s wife, on the other hand, hardly expresses a word except
in her letter to Stephen where she begs him to explain to her husband how
meaningless his affair with Anna is.
Given such a gender
gap in this film, accordingly, we soon realize that the various macho poses and
posturing of these two middle-aged sufferers of mid-life crisis and the young
over-testosteroned youth are made not for the women in their lives, but for
each other. Stephen, Charley’s, and even William’s competitive actions—their
physical pushes, pulls, punches and their spirited barbs of what they define as
wit—are enacted out of envy, dislike, and even hate, and just importantly, out
of desire, admiration of, and even the love of one another. It is no accident
in this film that Losey, even as his characters lay beside one another, reach
out for, and embrace the feminine other, positions his camera in a way that
features the male form. Early in the film, just before we first encounter the
Eve (Anna) of this tale, the males, student and don, almost display their
bodies to one another, as, staring into other’s eyes, they discuss Anna’s
existence, the camera languorously circling them as they stare at one another
and into space. To say the least, William is flirtatious with Stephen
throughout, while we witness none but verbal interchanges between him and Anna.
One need only
notice that the faculty in attendance of the cricket game, including the
Provost, focus on one figure only, the pure-bred athlete, William. When Stephen
mentions the Provost’s daughter (with whom Stephen he has just had a one-night
fling in bed) the old man at first seems not even to know of whom the younger
don is speaking, as if to reiterate that women in the world are nearly
meaningless.
When Stephen
rushes out—if his almost casual walk to the site of the crash can be described
as a “rush”—to inspect the accident of the very first scene, his only spoken
words, delivered almost in a scream, are almost hatefully directed to the
survivor Anna, who is attempting to exit the overturned auto: “Stop, you’re
standing on his head!” Realizing that William is dead, he almost
ritualistically closes the boy’s eyes, while Anna is left to fend for herself.
Despite her disorientation, we perceive her, under Losey’s direction, as
selfishly oblivious of the event (which, as I mentioned earlier, she caused),
as she blithely attempts to repaint her lips. Surely, after witnessing this, we
can hardly see her, in the retrospect that the movie lays out for us, as anyone
worthy of love?
And why, we have
to ask, was William so determined to visit his don just before his upcoming
wedding, in order to have a “man-to-man talk?” One can imagine all sorts of
possibilities, obviously, some of them quite mundane: might we have wanted
Stephen to be his best man? Was he seeking more information about his future
wife? Or….Might we have wanted to tell Stephen something important before
leaving Oxford?
Finally,
concerning the incident that I have never seen fully discussed, why does the
film end with yet another return to the “accident”—this at the very moment when
the seeming chastened Stephen enters his home with children and wife in tow,
closing the door behind him. Are we to discern that the longings Stephen and
the others have endured will soon begin all over again? That the true
“accident” concerns the very conditions that Stephen’s society and himself have
imposed upon his life? And who is behind the car of next accident? Another dear
friend, like Charley?
The fact that
neither Pinter or Losey answer the many questions they have posed do not mean
that such questions do not exist or are unimportant. For it is in just this way
that Losey’s film serves as a kind of “tabula rasa,” a blank slate upon which
one might possibly read anything? If I radically misread the film as a young
man, it may be that my reading today is not so completely different from
youthful one as I first imagined. But then I have a tendency to read things the
way others certainly will not.
Los Angeles,
June 16, 2014
Reprinted from International
Cinema Review (June 2014).
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