Old Yorker

  • Accident

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph Losey (1967)

    I didn’t see Accident in last summer’s Losey season at BFI.  Because I thought badly of nearly all his films that I did see then and had the idea his collaborations with Harold Pinter were Losey’s best work, I decided to see it again now.  Based on a novel by Nicholas Mosley, Accident is about the sexual permutations and infidelities achieved or desired within a group comprising:  two Oxford academics, Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) and Charley (Stanley Baker); their wives, Rosalind (Vivien Merchant) and Laura (Ann Firbank); and two students, William (Michael York) and Anna (Jacqueline Sassard).  Except for William, who dies in a motor accident, all these clever people are very unhappy.  Unpleasant too:  the two wives invite some sympathy but only because their husbands treat them so badly.  The pervasive bleakness and duplicity are oddly entertaining but this viewing left me puzzled in a way I hadn’t expected.   I thought I’d seen Accident at least twice before but much of it was unfamiliar.  I remembered the enigmatically rhymed car crashes (the first after dark, the second in broad daylight) that begin and end the picture.  The poisonous, frictional atmosphere of the sunny Sunday lunch-tea-supper party at Stephen and Rosalind’s home had lodged in my memory but little of the detail.  I think this forgetfulness may be because Accident is so self-contained.  The self-containment is fascinating to watch but the film has no life outside itself – no resonance beyond its duration on screen.

    The midsummer Sunday gathering is nevertheless a remarkable piece of cinema and the best episode in a Losey film that I know.   He captures the emotional shifts that occur on a long, hot day during which meals are eaten and lots of alcohol is drunk and the gourmandising is punctuated by short bursts of various physical exercise.  He gets across how the heat stuns and irritates the characters and both calms and intensifies the insidious tensions between them.   This occasion must feature some of the most ominous sunlight ever filmed:  the photography is by Gerry Fisher.  John Dankworth’s cunning score is jazzy with a few harp interludes.  There’s a truly absorbing moment when, towards the end of the day, Stephen goes up to Rosalind in their bedroom, and the harp music is played softly.  It seems to be playing inside Stephen’s head and that’s where you seem to be too.   Both dons live in surprisingly high style – even for the 1960s and allowing for Charley’s second wage as a television talking head.    Because of his track record, I couldn’t help thinking Losey was exaggerating the characters’ affluence the more firmly to establish them in the upper-middle classes of English society that he liked to skewer.  (As for the students, William is referred to more than once as an aristocrat and his girlfriend Anna has a quadruple-barrelled surname:  she’s Austrian.)

    Most of the action appears to be a flashback to what led up to the car accident but the progress of the narrative is not quite straightforward.  The occasional fractures in the time sequence are nothing like what’s occurred in films of the last few years like 21 Grams and Babel, where the fragmentation of time serves to complicate revelations about the people in the story, as well as to obscure the fact that that story, if told lineally, would be more implausibly melodramatic (or boring).   In Accident the interruptions to linear sequence don’t much affect your understanding of the motives for the characters’ actions, and don’t surprise you in what they disclose about either their psychology or their history.   The interruptions merely add to the structural complication of the piece in a formally pleasing way. More striking than these dislocations is the sequence in which Stephen meets up in London with an old flame – Francesca, ‘the Provost’s daughter’ (Delphine Seyrig) – and we see them meeting and dining and eventually in bed together.  Their lips don’t move (except to eat and drink) but we hear their voices on the soundtrack, speaking words they might have used in the situations we observe them in.

    Because nothing in the film is resolved, a sense of mystery – with an illusion of depth – remains.  Yet the themes in Accident don’t seem especially impenetrable or especially original either.   The Nicholas Mosley novel was published in 1965, the year after Pinter’s The Homecoming opened in London.   Both have as their pivotal character a philosophy don; they describe varieties of male sexual competitiveness and possessiveness, and the more or less elaborate games that men play to beat each other and to get what they want from women (not that they get it in Accident).  When William invites Stephen to dinner at his family’s country pile, all the men – dressed for dinner – play a kind of stunted rugby.  This involves thwacking physical collisions and scrums, and no freedom of movement, on the parquet floor of an atrium.  Losey then cuts to a staff-student game of cricket (a sport that Pinter loved passionately).  In The Homecoming the character of Ruth starts off as the returning professor’s well-behaved wife.  At the end he goes off, leaving her to provide sex to his father and his brothers – Ruth seems to be running, rather than exploited by, the male household.  In Accident, aspects of woman – object of desire, child-bearer, helpmate – are divided among the female characters.  Stephen, Charley and William all want Anna (Charley and, one assumes, William get to have sex with her).  Stephen’s heavily pregnant wife Rosalind keeps house and looks after their brood.  Charley’s wife Laura (a much smaller part) is so traumatised by his infidelity that she has taken to tending their huge garden in the pouring rain.

    By this stage of his screen career, Dirk Bogarde had mastered the art of conveying self-disgust to an extraordinary degree.  He’s already typecast as Stephen but he’s so accomplished to watch in this kind of role – Stephen’s loathing of his own moral meagreness is sometimes icy, sometimes anguished – that it’s a perverse treat.  The inflections Bogarde gives to lines that can be quietly spoken are just perfect and he’s disturbingly convincing in his scenes as a family man – there’s something dutifully caring and ultimately detached in the way Stephen is with his young children.   When he discovers the young couple in the crashed car and, as he helps Anna out, yells, ‘Don’t!  You’re standing on his face!’, it’s powerful.  Elsewhere, though, Bogarde is less impressive when Stephen has to shout or to express physical lust directly.  As the apparently more self-confident Charley (it’s hard to decide if he’s more voracious than Stephen or whether he just gets to eat more), Stanley Baker is tremendously (and aptly) annoying at most points of the Sunday party – especially when he’s playing tennis or kicking a ball around.   Yet because Charley is relatively unconstrained and because Baker is such a likeable actor, with a strong audience rapport, you increasingly enjoy watching the man he’s playing.   Vivien Merchant is brilliant as Rosalind:  she gives the most satisfying performance in the film, creating a credible character while, at the same time, letting us experience the almost abstract pleasure of the writing’s rhythm.   (Merchant’s reception of Stephen’s news that Charley – whom Rosalind fancies – has left Laura for Anna is shockingly funny.)

    Pinter’s lines, read by these expert actors, have a compelling and sustained pressure that makes the exchanges essentially believable even when the words are arranged in such a way as to put them at one remove from naturalistic speech.  An amazing thing about Pinter’s dialogue here is that the discomfiting repetitions and suppressions of what the characters mean to say are intensified rather than weakened when the actors are really not very good:  their uncertainty or miscalculation can increase the disorienting effect of the language.  This is true of Michael York, in his film debut, as William (the fact that he’s physically convincing in the role creates another kind of disjuncture between what we see and what we hear).  It’s true even of Jacqueline Sassard, who’s thoroughly bad as Anna – except that the combination of her beautiful, heavy, mask-like face, unnatural movement and even worse line readings actually strengthen the sense of Anna as a female archetype rather than a real, individual woman.  It’s not just the younger actors who can’t do the lines:   Alexander Knox is atrocious as the Provost of the Oxford college where Stephen and Charley work.  The youngest players – Maxwell Findlater and Carole Caplin (the Carole Caplin?), as Stephen and Rosalind’s children – are excellent.  Pinter himself has a cameo, as a television man with whom Stephen has a short meeting, and strikes me (as he did when I saw him on stage some years ago) as rather a bad actor.  He seems to speak the lines in a way that conveys nothing more than that he knows, as the writer of them, where the stresses should come.

    Shortly before the film started in NFT1 two women came in and sat down a few rows ahead of me.  One of the women was Antonia Fraser.  (Perhaps she was going on, after Accident, to the BFI screening of the film of the June 2009 celebration-of-Pinter event at the National Theatre.)   On the way out, I tried to hear what she and her companion thought of Accident but I failed.  All I got was:

    ‘Well, I rather … I thought it was much less-‘

    ‘Oh yes, much less …’

    ‘It was.  Much less …’

    There’s something satisfying in the thought that Pinter’s widow and her friends talk the way he wrote.

    20 January 2010

  • About Elly

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Darbareye Elly

    Asghar Farhadi (2009)

    Thanks to the success of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s previous film About Elly was released in the UK in 2012.   A group of middle-class Iranians travel from Tehran to the shores of the Caspian Sea for a three-day holiday.  Most of the group know each other from university days.  They include three married couples:  one of these, Shohreh (Merila Zarei) and Peyman (Peyman Moaadi), has two young children, a boy and a girl; another couple, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) and Amir (Mani Haghighi), has a little girl.  The third couple, Nassi (Rana Azadivar) and Manouchehr (Ahmad Mehranfar), are childless and there are two unattached adults in the party:  Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), who was a student with the others and who’s recently returned to Iran from Germany after a failed marriage; and Elly (Taraneh Alidousti), who teaches Sepideh and Amir’s daughter at nursery school.  Elly knows and is known by only Sepideh among the adults.  The holiday gets off to a bad start when the group arrive at the villa which Sepideh had booked from Tehran, only to be told by the elderly woman in charge of the place that its owners are returning next day.  She offers them another villa, right on the coast but in a poor state of repair.  The party have little option but to accept this alternative and set about making the villa habitable for their stay.

    It soon emerges that Sepideh has invited Elly along principally to introduce her to Ahmad – Sepideh jumps the gun remarkably when she lies to the old woman at the villa that the pair are on their honeymoon.  Ahmad and Elly tentatively take a shine to each other nevertheless and, as the first evening in the villa progresses, Elly, who’s initially shy and reticent, seems increasingly comfortable in the convivial company.  It’s impossible to get a phone signal from the villa and, shortly after the group’s arrival, Ahmad and Elly drive a little way away to buy some food supplies.   Elly makes a phone call from the car: she tells her mother in Tehran that she’s with a group of work colleagues at the seaside.  The following morning, Elly’s relaxed mood of the previous evening has disappeared.  She unhappily tells Sepideh that she must return to Tehran immediately.   Sepideh dissuades her and Elly agrees to keep an eye on the children while the wives are out and the husbands are playing a ball game on the beach.  Shohreh and Peyman’s son Arash swims out to sea and disappears from view.  Desperate attempts are made to find him, and he is eventually rescued and revived.  It’s only when the crisis with Arash has passed that the group notice that Elly is missing.  This time the search in the sea is unavailing.  Elly is never seen again.

    Asghar Farhadi’s screenplay for A Separation was constructed with great care, and so is the story he tells here.  He doesn’t forget what gets said in the early stages – and a great deal is said:  the cross-currents of conversation within the group on holiday are various and so rapid that the subtitles are difficult to keep up with.  Most of the conversation is jolly but Farhadi builds into the exchanges, and the characters’ actions, a complex of obfuscations, evasions and untruths.  He makes full use of these in due course.   Up to and including Elly’s disappearance, the film is completely absorbing – as a description both of a group of old friends and of an outsider to such a group.  Farhadi shows that, while the outsider is at a social disadvantage, they also have a position of power through being an unknown quantity.  The latter theme is reinforced by what happens to Elly:  the others assume that she’s drowned; so does a viewer of the film – but we never know whether she died trying to save the child or if she meant to go under.  The moment in which everything seems to change in About Elly has an impact comparable to that of another famous turning point on a beach, in Camus’s L’Etranger, and the scenes of panic that follow the disappearances of Arash and Elly are brilliantly staged.

    Elly’s departure is pivotal and catalytic.  A Separation also centred on a particular, crucial and uncertain event and Farhadi’s scrupulous plotting paid handsome dividends in the later film:  there was a powerful traction between his revealing what actually happened and, in the course of doing so, revealing things we didn’t know or hadn’t suspected about the characters and their lives.  About Elly doesn’t work so well as A Separation in its second half – Farhadi’s neat construction tends to reduce the mystery of Elly and her sudden absence.  It’s evident from quite early on that she’s anxiously hiding something about her life in Tehran.  (It turns out she has a fiancé (Saber Abar) there).  And the exposure of cracks in the couples’ marriages that follows on from Elly’s disappearance is rather schematic – especially in the case of Amir and Sepideh, who’s presented pretty unambiguously as the cause of most of what goes wrong on the holiday.

    In his Sight and Sound review which was used as the BFI programme note, Philip Kemp suggests that Farhadi is presenting ‘a critique of the lies and evasions that permeate Iranian society’.  This may be true but the characters in About Elly are educated liberals – and their values, to Western audiences anyway, are therefore distinct from what we assume to be the prevailing values in Iranian society.  It’s difficult to see them as exemplars of it.   I found the male characters in the film more individual than the women:  perhaps that’s intentional on Farhadi’s part – an illustration of the constraints on female self-expression in Iran – or perhaps it’s a result of my not being able to read what may be the more subtle range of expression of the actresses concerned.  (And perhaps those two things are linked, anyway.)   This is a minor criticism, though:  the ensemble acting in About Elly is very fine and if I single out Peyman Moaadi (Peyman) and Shahab Hosseini (Ahmad) for special praise it may be only because I know them from A Separation and so was impressed by the completely different characters they create here.

    26 October 2012

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