Customer Reviews

Accident

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

The simple decision of pursuing an very attractive student opens the gate to a complicated web of desire and deception; of immaturity and expected seduction. A magnificent exploration of the human behavior under certain border restrictions. Harold Painter, Joseph Losey and Dirk Bogarde had worked together previously in The Servant The undeniable Joseph Losey 's masterpiece, once more consolidated the best of each one of them in this casuistic and sinewy script with suggested motivations and smart dialogues that enrich still more a very meticulous film.

The style of Joseph Losey is reposed, hedonist, poisonous and very suggestive because his proposal has always been to demystify the bourgeois class through the sharp vision of their weaknesses and frivolities. And through the unavoidable process of decadence and moral disintegration, he unmasks the hidden perversions and surreptitious demons that coexist in the livings of this social stratum.

It is a slow paced film that deserves and demands all your concentration. But this effort has rewarding results at the end of the picture; sliding doors that invite us to rethink about a lot of unsaid attitudes and behavior patterns masked behind the conventionalism's ritual and the good manners.

A very sharp analysis of the social environment and a demolishing picture; Losey was another undesirable filmmakers who decided to emigrate England to maintain a certain distance respect USA. He was an eternal irreverent about the social patterns; if you examine briefly his films you will realize immediately, though you may argue there is a visible influence of the master of the silences. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Go for this and watch to that raising promise in progress: Michael York.

How on earth do the Boulting Brothers and John and Hayley Mills, amongst others, get to be included in the credits noted above? They have NOTHING TO DO WITH this brilliant adaptation of Nicholas Mosely's novel, "Accident".

First of all, the screenplay adaptation by British playwright, Harold Pinter (1930-2008), is a brilliant reduction of the dialogue to the most mundane level of non-communcation or miscommunication between the main characters, Oxford don Stephen (Bogard), his wife (Vivien Merchant, at that time, Pinter's wife), Stephen's colleague, Charley (Stanley Baker), and both men's involvement with Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) a student at Oxford who is also involved with Stephen's pupil, William (Michael York). Each line, each glance is loaded with double meaning, as the characters circle around each other.

In visual terms, American expatriate director Joseph Losey (who had previously collaborated with Pinter on "The Servant" - 1963 - and who would go on to a third collaboriation in the 1970 "The Go-Between") brilliantly fills in the details which the dialogue hints at. It's appearance versus reality, what seems and what is, all captured in lovely mid-summer in the English countryside where Stephen's house is located.

Buy it, see it - the Bogart Collection of three films (and with two of the three films mentioned here) is a good buy also.