Accident

I’m generally a fan of abstraction in dialogue and visuals whether it’s particularly meaningful or not. I’m not sure all of Losey’s editorial choices here are wholly meaningful, but as a matter of style I enjoy his juxtapositions of image and sound across time and space. Perhaps it does effectively compel the viewer to consider two related events and form different conclusions than one might have if they had been presented in a more straightforward manner, but there’s little uniformity when he does choose to employ it, and little evident payoff from it other than eliciting an impressed “Neat!”

Specifically you could cut this down to Bogarde’s ten-minute tryst with Seyrig and have a fascinating experimental short: in real-time, visually, they exchange no dialogue; they meet, have dinner, and return to her place without saying a word to one another. The image is overlaid with the telephone call that instigated their rendezvous, and with a discordant minimalist theme newly introduced to the film’s score. Shot from interesting angles and through rainy windows, it’s really a cool sequence, but does it mean much in the context of a larger narrative film? Perhaps nothing so deep.

Anyway, this is really a nice spin on the oft-told tale of an aging and insecure professor lusting after his beautiful pupil, here introducing a colleague who succeeds in taking her to bed and another student she can take out as her boyfriend. She’s gorgeous though vapid, easy to see that she’d inspire a wave of obsessive behavior and drive a series of events toward the titular accident which begins and ends the story. Pinter dialogue here, minimal, hilarious, loaded with meaning and danger. I do love the sort of thing a lot, and I’ll be looking for more Losey soon.