Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) and Charley (Stanley Baker) are a pair of university lecturers who differ in both personality and fundamental ideology – Stephen is a reserved intellectual who has been married for years and is about to welcome his third child into the world, while Charley is more of a playboy, someone who is willing to sacrifice whatever remnants of morality he has for the chance to satiate any of his unconventional desires. The common ground they have is that they’re both madly in love with Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), a strikingly beautiful woman of obscure origins, most likely rooted somewhere in the Austrian aristocracy, which only bolsters their fascination with her. However, she’s not that interested in the advances of these older men, rather choosing to spend her time liaising with William (Michael York), an ambitious young university student who is also under Stephen’s mentorship, and who idolizes him, almost to the point of obsession. The quartet of characters begin to find their lives intersecting – Stephen becomes bolder in his intentions to woo Anna, who is conflicted between his intelligence, William’s youthful vigour and Charley’s wild charms. This leads to a series of interactions, whereby all four of them find themselves struggling with the nature of desire and its relationship with individuality, all framed by a fateful car accident that causes a grim realization to the volatility of life, and its many different complexities that keep individuals such as these in a constant state of curious despair.

Accident is not a particularly good film for a number of reasons, but it is one that certainly leads the viewer into giving it the benefit of the doubt, right until the moment when it is clear that this is a film that is far too removed from any kind of redemption. Certainly not a disaster in any discernible way, Accident is a failure, albeit not a particularly noble one – a bundle of misguided moments, and a general sense of disinterest in the story it’s telling, proves this film to be something of a laborious exercise. This is most likely the result of the incompatibility between director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter, both terrific artists on their own, but their collaboration returning nothing but overwrought melodrama disguised as a nihilistic existential tragedy. Ultimately, this film fails because it never manages to reach a coherent narrative point, nor is it able to align itself with any discernible genre, and thus has to rely on its own story, rather than using the conventions of its chosen genre as a way to supplement an utterly unremarkable story that says nothing that any logical viewer didn’t already know. There are some saving graces peppered throughout the film, but they’re so scarce and inconsequential to the broader product, they aren’t able to redeem what is simply a banal foray into the minds of a group of despicable characters, which is neither insightful nor entertaining, and just becomes a tedious endeavour.

What is most striking about Accident in terms of the areas in which it isn’t particularly successful is that we can’t necessarily assert the critique that it has a story that deserved a better execution, mainly because the style in which this film was made fit the story it was telling. In this regard, Losey’s vision is quite remarkable – there was nothing particularly compelling about the story, and while it is very likely that it is an earnest adaptation, there’s no doubt that this kind of story works better on the printed page, with the structure being fit for Nicholas Mosley’s source novel, rather than being translatable to the screen. The story of a group of upper-class twits yearning to satiate their infidelious cravings is simply not all that endearing, and it isn’t helped by Losey’s refusal to develop them further than the archetypes Pinter throws onto the page. The bourgeoisie is a group that has been the subject of many remarkable films, mainly because these works normally hail from artists who are willing to look beneath the veneer of lavish lifestyles, offering something more meaningful. Accident proposes that the idea of a happily married man with a solid career and a beautiful countryside home he shares with his lovely family is somewhat indicative of suffering, only because he can’t muster the courage to pursue his desires for a younger woman who is simply not interested in him. It all leads back to the film’s incessant need to convince us to the plight of a group of individuals who simply can’t be pitied by any self-aware individual, who refuses to subscribe to the idea that these characters and their philandering ways are in any way meaningful remnants of reality.

The film provides us with a set of profoundly unlikeable characters, which is not a flaw on its own, but rather part and parcel of a deeper problem that persists throughout this film. It’s not often that we find a work populated by such despicable individuals, who are further worsened by the fact that no one in charge of crafting these characters seems to have any regard for them, choosing to rather portray them as the embodiment of upper-class excess in the most irrecoverably frustrating way imaginable. The constant need for approval that seems to be a shared character trait between them all is perhaps the only relatable part of this film – and yet, Accident even squanders this, turning them from complex individuals that are looking for some sense of belonging, to a motley crew of pretentious, angst-filled archetypes that aren’t even conveyed with a coherent sense of what it means to be human. Pinter was a terrific writer, but he proves that he too wasn’t infallible, as his constructions of these characters as being little more than specks of anxiety and wealthy arrogance pointed to the rare moment of weakness in his writing. It certainly doesn’t help that Losey fails to show any coherency behind the camera, presenting us with dozens of misguided scenes, the apparent profundity of which we are supposed to be entirely enraptured by.

It’s a difficult ordeal when not even Dirk Bogarde, one of the most wonderfully enigmatic actors of his generation, isn’t able to salvage the film. An actor of great complexity, Bogarde is given the archetypal figure of the profoundly lonely man searching for some form of happiness in a time when it is increasingly difficult for him to exist on his own terms, finding it challenging to assimilate into society, as it doesn’t seem to be aligned with his own ideals. Bogarde played this kind of character so many times, it became something of a trademark for him, with the brilliance coming in how the different films navigated his particular talents. Accident disregards his immense talents, and instead positions him in a role that is built solely around a persona he had perfected, which did nothing other than just being in the film, rattling off the mediocre dialogue without any of the complexity we’ve come to appreciate from him – dour, humourless and barely even present, the performance just isn’t there – this isn’t entirely the fault of Bogarde, who does his best with a bland character, who is written to be little more than a plot device. Mercifully, there is some semblance of charm in this performance, which is more than can be said for those given by Stanley Baker and Michael York, who are both actively awful, the former being just the archetypal antagonist, constructed around a series of insidious quirks that are more flimsy than they are sinister, and the latter failing to bring any nuance to the role of a pretentious student that is hopelessly oblivious to his own arrogance – just like the film as a whole. Both actors demonstrated themselves to be far better in other projects, so it’s likely their weak performances here were simply the result of incompetence in terms of the filmmakers. Finally, Jacqueline Sassard is used for very little other than being an object of desire, which renders her performance as entirely one-note, which is a pity since she is actually very good in the few accidental moments in which she is afforded the chance to show some charm, which come far too rarely.

Accident is a film without any discernible direction – it seems unaware of whether it is supposed to be a lavish melodrama or a bleak, neo-realist social drama, and it fails to utilize what little promise it had. There are some effective moments – the first act is suitably mysterious, and the film does quite well in establishing the characters. The problem comes when it has to persevere with these relatively thin characters throughout the rest of the film, which is in itself quite lifeless already. Losey and Pinter are artists who are capable of utter brilliance when they’re in their element – but Accident is not the finest work for either of them, and they both seem to struggle with the constraints of material that was simply not suitable for the screen. It isn’t sure of whether to be an ethereal, metaphysical drama, or something more grounded, and in this confusion, turns out to be a listless excuse of a film, a scattered series of moments sewn together by the promise of some complex approach to narrative structure, which creates an atmosphere in which it is bewildering at best, and overwrought at worst. Accident simply doesn’t operate as a successful film on any clear level – the drama is forced, the structure convoluted, the performances bland and the entire experience just a hopelessly incompetent series of vague ideas that are never realized beyond being outwardly stated when it was clear no one was willing to put in the effort to make them tangible. I’d argue this story deserved better, but that would mean there was a story worth telling, and I can’t imagine a time in which such a self-indulgent journey into the machinations of the upper-class was ever appealing to anyone other than those depicted here, which is precisely why Accident is such a misguided, and ultimately completely unnecessary, cinematic work. The film really lives up to its title.