“1917” - Sam Mendes (2019)

1917 (2019) is a British war drama set in the brutal trenches during the First World War.  Directed and co-written by Sam Mendes, the film has achieved wide popularity and was nominated for 10 Oscars (U.S. Academy Awards), winning three of them, including the one for Best Cinematography.  Indeed the cinematography is the most striking thing about this work, because the entire film has the appearance of consisting of just two camera shots.  It’s my understanding that films comprising only a single take have been made before, but 1917 must surely be the most successful execution of that concept/scheme.  

The story of 1917 concerns two British lance corporals, Will Schofield (played by George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), who are charged with a critical and dangerous overnight mission.  With communication lines down, the task for them is to cross over “no man’s land” in front of their trenches in order to deliver a crucial message to another British battalion that would enable the recipient of that message to avert a German slaughter of British troops and save 1,600 lives.  The message, from General Erinmore (Colin Firth), is specifically directed to an officer of the other British battalion, Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch), to call off an intended attack, because aerial reconnaissance has discovered that the German army has setup a trap and will annihilate the attacking forces.  

Blake is eager to carry out the dangerous assignment, because he wants to be a hero and because his brother is a member of the endangered battalion.  Schofield, however, is not enthusiastic at all.  He is a survivor of the devastating Battle of the Somme (300,000 deaths and over one million casualties) the year before, and he is familiar with the futility of war, but he agrees to go with Blake out of loyalty to his friend.  

The film begins on the evening of April 6th, 1917, and the film’s first shot, which lasts about an hour, starts by showing the lance corporals Blake and Schofield tranquilly snoozing under a tree in what appears to be a peaceful, pastoral setting.  We are soon to see that their environment is anything but peaceful.  They are awakened and informed about their dangerous assignment, and as the camera continues to track them, they are shown walking overt to and in the front-line war trenches looking for the place to cross over into no man’s land, which due, to a recent German retreat, is believed to be temporarily safe to move through.  

As the shot progresses, one becomes increasingly aware that this is one continuous take, but the camera movement is so carefully orchestrated and psychologically motivated that the continuity of the shot does not intrude on the viewer’s involvement in what happens (at least not for me).  (Actually, there are moments in the film where near-invisible camera cuts have likely been made, but the first hour of the film certainly looks like a single take.)  Some reviewers have found this single-take cinematography (by Oscar-winner Roger Deakins) to be gimmicky and artificial, and they have therefore panned the film (e.g. [1,2]).  But I, along with most reviewers (e.g.. [3,4]), found the visual flow of the film to be natural and compelling.  The camera moves, because it takes the watcher to a view that he or she is motivated to see.   
 

But this cinematography is more than just “natural”.  It establishes and maintains a moving aura of labyrinthine entanglement that visually evokes a dominating mood for the film.  The camera work makes one viscerally feel that Blake and Schofield find themselves in a relentless and continually evolving hell, which keeps presenting them with threatening surprises from which they must escape in order to carry out their crucial life-preserving mission.  So I would say this adroit cinematography constitutes the very soul of the film.

Further into this “first” shot we see Blake and Schofield in various bizarre and life-threatening situations out in no man’s land.  While the two of them are temporarily taking shelter in an abandoned farmhouse, they watch an aerial dogfight between a German plane and some Allied aircraft.  The German plane is shot down, and in flames it crashes into the farmhouse.  Blake and Schofield just barely get out of the way of the plane crash, and then they quickly manage to rescue the burned German pilot from his crashed plane.  But while Schofield is not looking, the pilot fatally stabs Blake.  Although Schofield shoots and kills the pilot, he is unable to save the life of his best friend, Blake.  This is a shock to the viewer, because less than half-way through the film, one of the two protagonists is now gone.  So Schofield now has to carry on alone.

After Schofield has more tense encounters, the film’s first shot finally comes to an end when he engages a German sniper in a gunfight that results in the death of the sniper and causes Schofield to lose consciousness.  
The “second” shot of the film begins later in the night, near dawn, when Schofield regains consciousness, and it continues with the same action-packed tenor as the first shot.  Schofield continues to have deadly encounters with the German combatants that he encounters.  At one point while fleeing his  pursuers, he jumps into a river and winds up getting swept over a high waterfall.  Eventually he manages to find and make his way to the British battalion under the command of Colonel Mackenzie that he has been seeking.  But precious time is running out, and Schofield still has to find Colonel Mackenzie’s trench and get him to call of his imminent attack.

Throughout this sinuous tale of Schofield’s struggles, we get a real, on-the-ground, feeling for what WWI trench warfare must have been like.  Although the story of 1917 is classed as fiction, it is based on tales that Sam Mendes heard when he was young from his grandfather about the latter’s experiences in WWI.  So Mendes apparently based this work on testimony that was as psychologically personal and authentic as he could find.  And the key feeling that prevails the work is one of entrapment.  It is  like an ongoing nightmare from which there seems to be no escape.  

There have been various esteemed cinematic efforts over the years, such as Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), that seek to convey a basic truth about war – namely that “war is hell”.  And these anti-war films almost invariably evoke a sense of alienation, usually by directly showing characters who are alienated.  We see clearly direct evidence that those characters are alienated.  But 1917, thanks to  its brilliant camera work, goes further and provides an even greater sense of immediacy.  We, the viewers, have the same visual experiences that the portrayed characters have and feel our own personal sense of alienation.  We never really know much about Schofield as a person in this tale.  He is just an everyman who serves as a screen surrogate for the viewer so that he or she can have his or her own horrific experiences of life and combat in the trenches.

For these reasons I recommend that you see 1917 so that you can, like Schofield, also experience the existentially challenging feelings conjured up by its amazing camera work.

★★★½

Notes:

1. Peter Sobczynski, “1917", RogerEbert.com, (25 December 2019).   
   
2. Manohla Dargis,“‘1917’ Review: Paths of Technical Glory”, The New York Times, (24 December 2019).   
   
3. Philip Concannon, “1917 orchestrates World War I as a one-shot action ride”, Sight and Sound, (13 January 2021).   
   
4. Richard Whittaker, “1917", The Austin Chronicle, (10 January 2020).    
   

“Persona” - Ingmar Bergman (1966)

Persona (1966), written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, is one of that great Swedish filmmaker’s most challenging films.  Many viewers and critics alike have found this film, mostly just showing two isolated women looking to interact with each other, to be largely incomprehensible, and they could not understand even what the film is about.  Their difficulties were exacerbated by the problems they had making out which key scenes in the film were supposed to be imaginary and which ones were supposed to be “real”.  Not surprisingly, Persona won few awards when it was released, and it has drawn heavy criticism from such leading critics as Andrew Sarris [1] and Jonathan Rosenbaum [2].

Nevertheless and despite the film’s supposed inscrutability, Persona’s novel and artistic treatment of fundamental aspects of personhood has gradually attracted an enthusiastic global following, and it is now regarded by many as Bergman’s masterpiece and as one of the greatest films ever made [3,4,5,6,7,8,9].  The British Film Institute's 2012 international poll of film critics ranked Persona as the 17th greatest film of all time [11], and its 2012 international poll of film directors ranked Persona as the 13th greatest film of all time [12].  But even though Persona has attracted a devoted following, there is still widespread disagreement about what it all means.  As a result, there have been several books and collections devoted to the film, and film scholar Thomas Elsaesser has suggested that Persona may be the most seriously written-about film ever [6].

The film concerns two women, Elisabet Vogler (played Liv by Ullmann), who is a famous stage actress, and Alma (Bibi Andersson), who is a young nurse.  But before introducing these two personages, Bergman begins his film cryptically by showing an old film projector and then some disconnected images, including a slapstick silent-film sequence, a spider, a crucifixion, and a lamb being slaughtered.  Then we see a young boy waking up in a hospital cot and looking around, finally gazing on a large screen showing a blurry image of a woman’s face.

Then we are introduced to the two women, Elisabet and Alma.  In the middle of one of her stage performances, Elisabet suddenly and mysteriously became mute.  Her doctors subsequently determined that there is nothing physically wrong with Elisabet and that her now-total silence is the result of a stubborn decision on her part.  Elisabet’s psychiatrist doctor (played by Margaretha Krook) believes that Elisabet’s total withdrawal is due to a fanatic concern about her personal authenticity – Elisabet apparently doesn’t want to express anything that is not fundamentally true about herself, and so she is holding to her silence.  Consequently the doctor assigns nurse Alma to take Elisabet to the doctor’s remote island cottage and see if she can spend some relaxing time with the actress and help bring the woman out of her malaise.  

As I mentioned, it is argued by many (e.g. [5,6]) that the events shown in the film don’t add up to a single coherent story, thereby leaving viewers to construct their own stories out of the subsequent narrative shards that are presented.  These narrative shards can be grouped into six collections.

First “Conversation”
At the cottage, Alma tells her mute companion that she is happy to finally find someone to listen to her own babbling.  She begins talking about her current fiancé and also about her first romantic affair that was with an older man and that lasted five years.  

Then she tells a more detailed and sexually explicit story about a time when she was already involved with her fiancé and she went alone to the beach.  There she met another woman and the two of them engaged in some nude sunbathing.  Two young men then appeared, and Alma’s new woman friend uninhibitedly got them involved in a sex orgy.  Alma describes experiencing some intense orgasms, and film critic Roger Ebert commented that this was “the most real experience Alma has ever had” [4].  Later, however, Alma became pregnant and had an abortion, and she still feels guilty about this.  All this is told verbally, and there are no flashbacks here, as the mute Elisabet listens attentively.

Nighttime Encounter
It is becoming increasingly evident that Alma idolizes her patient, Elisabet, and wants to be like the famous star.  In the evening Alma thinks she hears Elisabet whispering to her to go to bed.  And then later at night, Alma wakes up to see (or perhaps dreams) Elisabet coming to her and embracing her tenderly.  In the morning, though, Allma asks Elisabet about these two incidents, and the woman silently denies that they occurred.

The Argument
One day Alma drives to town to mail some letters they have written, and she notices that Elisabet's letter to her doctor is not sealed, so she proceeds to read it.  It is a patronizing letter that is dismissive of Alma and mentions the nurse's personal story about her beach orgy and abortion. Alma, of course, becomes angry and withdraws from her hitherto worshipful feelings about her patient.

At this point the film briefly breaks up with some artificial cinema edits like in the opening sequence, thereby reminding the viewers that they are just watching a movie.

When Alma returns home, she angrily confronts Elisabet and threatens to scald her with a pot of boiling water.  Frightened, Elisabet speaks out for the first and begs Alma not to do it.  Then Alma furiously goes on to tell her that she knows the woman is a very bad person.  Elisabet runs off, and when Alma, coming to her senses, chases after her and begs her for forgiveness, Elisabet refuses to forgive her.

Elisabet’s Husband Comes
One night, Alma hears a man outside calling for Elisabet, and it turns out to be Elisabet's husband (played by Gunnar Björnstrand).  The man seems to have bad eyesight, and he mistakes Alma for his wife.    Although Alma tells him he is mistaken, she very soon succumbs and assumes Elisabet's identity.  Alma and the husband then go on to have sex together while Elisabet, close by, silently watches.

Elisabet's Confession
Earlier, Elisabet had received a letter from her husband that contained a picture of her son, which she had proceeded to tear up.  Now Alma meets with Elisabet to talk about why Elisabet tore up the picture.  Elisabet proceeds to give her account, and we see her face, but her account is told in Alma’s voice.  The voice says that the only thing that Elisabet wanted that she did not have was motherhood, and so she became pregnant. However, she soon regretted her decision and tried to have a self-induced abortion, but she failed in this effort.  She wound up giving birth to a boy who she hoped would die and whom she has since always  despised.  Nevertheless her rejected son has always craved her love.

Strangely, this same story is then repeated word-for-word, only now showing Alma’s face telling the exact same story.

Ending

The film ends with Alma in a distressed state.  She adamantly asserts to Elisabet that she has her own identity that is very distinct from that of Elisabet.  She later finally manages to get Elisabet to say something – the word "nothing".  Then Alma packs up her things and gets on a bus to leave the cottage, which is accompanied by a shot showing  a modern film crew filming her.

So what can be said about the overall meaning of this odd, disjointed work?  As one watches it, it is possible to make out some key themes that resonate throughout:

• Personal authenticity (and inauthenticity).  What is the true essence of a person and how is it revealed?  
• Images of the face and the degree to which they can reveal or mask one’s true personhood.  
• Touching with hands and the degree to which that can confirm the reality of what one sees.
• The inadequacy of language for revealing the essential nature of experience.
• The never-ending quest for the true meaning of life.
  

These various themes and metaphors in the film have elicited a range of commentary over the years, but the most interesting thoughts I have come across have been those of Susan Sontag, who wrote an insightful essay on Persona in 1967, soon after the film was released [5].  For example, on the issue of plot and how one might best construct a coherent narrative with what is shown in the film, Sontag doesn’t believe that Bergman ever had any intention offering a real plot [5]:

“Once it is conceived that the desire to ‘know’ may be (in part) systematically thwarted, the old expectations about plotting can no longer hold. At first, it may seem that a plot in the old sense is still there; only it’s being related at an oblique, uncomfortable angle, where vision is obscured. Eventually though it needs to be seen that the plot isn’t there at all in the old sense, and therefore that the point isn’t to tantalise but to involve the audience more directly in other matters, for instance in the very processes of ‘knowing’ and ‘seeing’.”

And on the interesting topic of what is Alma’s authentic self and to what degree does she move to find herself, Sontag has an interesting take.  She asserts that Alma and Elisabet can be considered to be two sides of one person [5]:

“It’s correct to speak of the film in terms of the fortunes of two characters named Elizabeth and Alma who are engaged in a desperate duel of identities. But it is no less true, or relevant, to treat Persona as what might be misleadingly called an allegory: as relating the duel between two mythical parts of a single ‘person’, the corrupted person who acts (Elizabeth) and the ingenuous soul (Alma) who founders in contact with corruption.”

(Indeed, at one point Bergman shows a special image of a single face that consists of half of Elisabet’s face on one side and half of Alma’s face on the other side.)

Sontag’s comment here is,  to me, the most compelling interpretive observation on the film, and it fits well with several other expressionistic sequences of the film, too, such as (a) the nighttime encounter between Elisabet and  Alma, (b) Elisabet’s husband mistakenly taking Alma for his wife, and (c) the exact repetition of Elisabet’s confession, showing first Elisabet’s face and then Alma’s face, but each time spoken in Alma’s voice.

So Persona is a challenging and perplexing film, but it also has a fascinating focus, and I believe it is worthy of your interest.  

 ★★★★

Notes:

1. Andrew Sarris, “films”, The Village Voice, (23 March 1967).  
   
2. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Scenes From an Overrated Career”, The New York Times, (4 August 2007).   
   
3. Roger Ebert, “Persona”, RogerEbert.com, (7 November 1967).   
   
4. Roger Ebert, “Persona”, Great Movie, “RogerEbert.com”, (7 January 2001).   
   
5. Susan Sontag, “Persona – Review by Susan Sontag”, Sight and Sound, (Autumn 1967).  
   
6. Thomas Elsaesser, “The Persistence of Persona”, The Criterion Collection, (17 March 2016).   
   
7. Chuck Bowen, “Blu-ray Review: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona on the Criterion Collection”, Slant Magazine, (21 March 2014).   
   
8. Peter Bradshaw, “Persona review – Ingmar Bergman's enigmatic masterpiece still captivates”, The Guardian, (29 December 2017).   
   
9. Acquarello, “Persona, 1966", Strictly Film School, (25 December 2017).   
   
10. “Critics’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).      
11. “Directors’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).      
    

“Cries and Whispers” - Ingmar Bergman (1972)

Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, 1972) is a unique film in several respects and is unlike other films in Bergman’s oeuvre.  For one thing, the film doesn’t trace out a straightforward, coherent narrative like most filmed dramas.  Instead, it consists of a collection of emotion-tempered recollections and visions on the parts of its four main characters.  On account of this, the film has drawn a range of reactions from various reviewers.  Famed film critic Andrew Sarris hated the film [1].  On the other hand, Roger Ebert was captivated by the film and had this to say about it [2]:

"’Cries and Whispers’ is like no movie I've seen before, and like no movie Ingmar Bergman has made before, although we are all likely to see many films in our lives, there will be few like this one.  It is hypnotic, disturbing, frightening.”

And overall, the film has come to be regarded as a classic [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9].  Moreover, the  artistic craftsmanship employed in the making of this offering was recognized by the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by earning five Oscar nominations, including one for “Best Picture” (not just a nomination for “Best International Feature Film”, i.e. Best Foreign Film).

For my part, as I watched Cries and Whispers, I was initially somewhat skeptical and thought that some of the characters were perhaps too schematically drawn to fuel a gripping drama.  But as the film played on, I became increasingly drawn in to the psychological themes on display.  As critic Emma Wilson remarked [8],

“Its [Cries and Whispers’s] achievement, making it emerge from Bergman’s extraordinary corpus as unique, is in its incandescent touching of love and horror in their fullest extremes.”

Indeed, there are a number of passionate human existential themes interwoven into this tale:

• Honesty and authenticity
• Communication
• Human intimacy 
• Pain
• Death
• Love
  

But before we look at the coverage of these themes in the film, we need to clear up a matter concerning the English title of the film.  “Cries and Whispers” is an English translation of the Swedish title, “Viskningar och rop”, but the English rendering likely suggests the feelings of whimpering sadness.  However, as Norman Holland has pointed out, the English word ‘cries’ has two meanings – (a) “crying out”, i.e. shouting, and (b) tearful sadness, whereas the Swedish word ‘rop’ connotes only shouting [4].  So a more precise, though less poetic, translation of “Viskningar och rop” would be “Whispers and Shouts”.  This suggests that a key aspect of this film is concerned not so much with sadness, but with contrasting types of spoken communication, which is one of the above-listed themes of the film.  

The events in the film take place in a large manor house in the Swedish countryside near the end of the 19th century, and they concern the thoughts and feelings of the four adult women who are staying there.  (There are men in this film, but they are mostly mechanical ciphers with little feeling.)  Three of these women are sisters – Agnes (played by Harriet Andersson), her older sister Karin (Ingrid Thulin), and Agnes’s younger sister Maria (Liv Ullmann) – and the fourth woman is the housemaid, Anna (Kari Sylwan), who has served at the home for twelve years.  Karin and Maria have come to the mansion to attend to their terminally ill sister, Agnes, who is suffering in the final stages of intestinal cancer.  The film opens showing Agnes in bed and suffering extreme pain, the intensity of which is underlined by a two-minute extreme closeup shot showing Agnes’s agonized face.  In the adjoining room the other three women are shown expressing their concern.  

Then the film begins its sequence of subjective recollections and visions, some of which seem to be fantasies.  These are all encapsulated by fade-ins and fade-outs from and to a deep red color, rather than black, and they feature a closeup of the woman having the vision before fully fading to a deep red hue.  Indeed color is a key feature of this film, particularly red, which Bergman once said represented for him the “interior of the soul” [5].  And of course black and white have also always been key shades for Bergman.  Norman Holland has symbolized these three colors for Bergman as “red for the fruitful, sensuous mother; white for the virgin; black for the death-goddess” [4].  Here in this film we can further identify these colors with the four women: Maria (red), Karin (black), Anna (white), and Agnes (white).

The sequence of subjective recollections and visions provide little narratives concerning how the four women see themselves and the others.  After all, this is only natural – we tend to characterize ourselves and other people in our acquaintance not as lists of facts, but in terms of brief narratives that we have constructed for the purpose [10,11,12].  

To reveal Maria’s nature, there is a revelatory recollection of an occasion when Agnes’s doctor, David (Erland Josephson), pays a brief clinical visit to the mansion and before departing is privately approached by Maria.  We learn that Maria and David had had a past extramarital affair (which had induced her neglected husband Joakim (Henning Moritzen) to attempt suicide) and that now Maria wants to rekindle things.  But David doesn’t want to restart anything with the woman, and he holds her in front of a mirror so she can see his description of how her many years of selfish, good-natured  superficiality has affected her face.  Maria, looking at her image in the mirror, seems to accept David’s painful diagnosis.  

On another occasion, though, Maria is shown approaching her sister Karin and seeking to restore their once affectionate relationship when they were growing up.  Maria wants to again touch and kiss her sister, but Karin is standoffish and reluctant to do that.  However, Karin eventually succumbs to Maria’s approaches, and they embrace affectionately.  On a later occasion, though, Karin wants to resume the affectionate gestures with her sister, but Maria is shocked and has forgotten all about the earlier encounter.  This reveals that, essentially, Maria is a mostly genial, outward-going, touchy-feely person, but she lives mostly in the present and generally doesn’t retain long-held feelings.

Karin, on the other hand, is a lonely and thoughtful, inner-directed person who harbors long-held resentments.  There is a recollective vision which shows her having dinner with her husband, Fredrik (Georg Årlin), who is cold and self-centered.  Afterwards, she takes a piece of broken glass and uses it to painfully mutilate her genitalia so that she can deny her husband from having sex with her.

Anna, the maid, is a simple person but full of warmth and compassion.  She is religious and prays to God regularly, and she doesn’t question what she considers God’s unfathomable wisdom for having years ago taken the life of her young daughter.  After Agnes’s death, Anna recalls or imagines a period when Agnes briefly came back to life and called out for solace from her deathbed.  Karin and Maria were disturbed at the sight of such an apparition and withdrew in horror, but Anna went to Agnes and instinctively enfolded her in her bosom the way a mother would do to comfort her suffering child.

We don’t get much about Agnes’s inner personal vision until the end of the film.  Maria’s and Karin’s  husbands come to the manor home to shut things down, and they cold-heartedly dismiss Anna without any severance.  So Anna must clear out her things, and in the process of tidying things up, she comes across Agnes’s diary.  Anna reads an entry in the diary, which is dramatically visualized, in which Agnes describes an earlier time when she was feeling better, and an occasion when she, Karin, Maria, and Anna frolicked together in a park.  In particular, Agnes highlighted a shared moment of oneness when they engaged in swinging on a swing.  This was such a special moment for Agnes, and she said [4],

“The people I am most fond of in all the world were with me. I could hear their chatting around me. I could feel the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands.  I wanted to hold the moment fast and thought,

‘Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.’”

So the film ends giving one the feeling that though her life was painful and tragically shortened, Agnes was perhaps the one who lived life most authentically and thereby to the fullest.  She had the ability to recognize and hold onto all the beautiful moments she experienced in life.  This is the scene that brings things together and makes the film a coherent whole.  But this is only one of the film’s moving expressions of engagement (or would-be engagement).

In fact there are several scenes in Cries and Whispers that critics have singled out as being uniquely brilliant, even for Ingmar Bergman.  Emma Wilson, writing for The Criterion Collection, treasured two other scenes – one of Anna enfolding Agnes in her bosom and another of Agnes returning to life, to the horror of her sisters [8]:

“These two scenes are unequaled in any film, I think, in their finding of a form, an image, to hold unspeakable emotions.“

Roger Ebert had his own take on favorite scenes [2]:

"These two scenes – of Anna, embracing Agnes, and of Karin and Maria touching like frightened kittens – are two of the greatest Bergman has ever created.”

When you see the film, you may have your own favorites.  Together, all these moments of visionary emotive expression in Cries and Whispers add up to a moving cinematic experience.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Andrew Sarris, “films in focus”, The Village Voice, (28 December 1972).   
   
2. Roger Ebert, “Cries and Whispers”, RogerEbert.com, (12 February 1973).   
   
3. Vincent Canby, “Bergman's New ‘Cries and Whispers’”, The New York Times, (22  December 1972).   
   
4. Norman N. Holland, “Ingmar Bergman, Cries and Whispers, Viskningar och rop, 1984.”, A Sharper Focus, (1984).   
   
5. Peter Cowie, “Cries and Whispers”, The Criterion Collection, (18 June 2001).   
   
6. Roger Ebert, “Cries and Whispers”, Great Movies, RogerEbert.com, (18 August 2002).   
   
7. Marco Lanzagorta, “Cries and Whispers”, Senses of Cinema. (March 2003).   
   
8. Emma Wilson, “Cries and Whispers: Love and Death”, The Criterion Collection, (1 April 2015).
   
9. Margarita Landazuri, "Cries and Whispers”, Turner Classic Movies, (23 February 2016).  
   
10. Roger Schank and Gary Saul Morrison, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Rethinking Theory), Northwestern, (1990).  
11. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, in Narrative Intelligence (2003), Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers (eds.), John Benjamin Publishing Co.
12. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vols. I- III, (1983-1985), University of Chicago Press.

“Nomadland” - Chloé Zhao (2020)

Nomadland (2020) is an award-winning drama whose approach to the realism of its subject matter is both original and also something that underlies the film’s themes.  This film is a story about “vandwellers” in America – people who live in campervans, RVs, mobile homes, or modified buses and have no fixed abode.  Although the film is a work of dramatic fiction, it is closely based on a nonfiction book that documents the lives of these wandering vandwellers, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017) by Jessica Bruder (in fact Jessica Bruder is credited as a “consulting producer” for the film).  Moreover, almost all of the people who appear in this film are real-life nomadic vandwellers with no prior acting experience.  They are just playing themselves.  

However, Nomadland is not an example of fly-on-the-wall cinema verite.  It is a carefully crafted drama, with masterful cinematography by Joshua James Richards and haunting sound-track music by Ludovico Einaudi.  Neither is it quite appropriate to categorize this film as another example of Italian neo-realism, because there are certain distinguishing aspects of this film that make it rather unique.  

For one thing the film was written, directed, edited and co-produced by Chinese-born American Chloé Zhao, and although Ms. Zhao received a film education at NYU film school, she brings her own original, externally-based eye to the aspects of American life that she writes and films about.  In the context of this film, she seems fascinated by a phenomenon of growing general alienation that is starting to emerge among many ordinary people in America.  And as this film shows, many people have no choice but to accept it.  

So alienation is clearly one important aspect of Nomadland, but there are also other thematic elements present, as well, and these all collectively contribute to reasons for why Zhao’s film has been so remarkably well-received.  On the awards front, Nomadland had almost a clean sweep.  The film won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress (and nominations in three other categories) at the 93rd U.S. Academy Awards.  It won the Golden Lion (best film) at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.  It was chosen as Best Film at the 74th British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs).  And at the 78th Golden Globe Awards, it won an award for Best Motion Picture – Drama and an award for Best Director.  And among top film critics, Nomadland has been widely praised [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].

The meandering story of Nomadland is concerned with a sixtyish woman, Fern (played by award-winning actress Frances McDormand), who has just embarked on a new life as a nomadic vandweller.  She and her husband had worked for years at a gypsum plant in small company-town Empire, Nevada.  But now the gypsum company has shut down, and her husband has just died, leaving the childless Fern alone and with no means of support.  So she purchases a van and converts it into something she can live in while she travels about looking for work.  When asked if she is homeless, she responds with no, she is “houseless”.  

The entire film then focalizes exclusively on Fern as she travels about the western United States in search of odd jobs that she can use for support.  However, Fern is so laid-back and laconic that much of what we learn in the film about vandwellers comes not from Fern, but from the fellow vandwellers that she meets and interacts with.  And as I mentioned, virtually everyone Fern meets is a real-life vandwelling nomad.  Nevertheless, Frances McDormand’s pensive performance as Fern is crucial to the success of the film.  As the film proceeds, we want to know more about what Fern is thinking and feeling.

After Fern heads out on the road from the shutting down town of Empire, she secures a seasonal job at a massive Amazon fulfilment center (warehouse for third-party shipping).  Although the workers don’t appear to be mistreated, the sheer size of the operation makes everyone on the floor like a tiny cog in a gigantic machine.  This is a telling visual metaphor for the impending gig economy and streamlined supply chain that so many ordinary people are now facing.

One of Fern’s coworkers at the warehouse, Linda, convinces her to come to a meet-up for vandwellers in the Arizona desert.  The event is hosted by Bob Wells, a charismatic real-life nomad who seeks to organize cooperative support for his fellow vandwellers.  Although some  vandwellers are middle-class retirees who have embraced this way of life in order to fulfill their love for freedom and the open road, most of these people are like Fern – forced by poverty to live in a van.  At Wells’s meet-ups these people can share tricks and info about how to get by on the road.

Later Fern meets and becomes friends with a congenial elderly woman nomad, Swankie, from whom she learns more about survival under impecunious circumstances on the road.  Swankie also tells her that she, herself, has terminal cancer, but she wants to close out her life on the open road rather than in a hospital.

After the extended encounter with Swankie, Fern is shown working in the Black Hills, South Dakota, where she runs into Dave (David Strathairn, the only other actor in the film with significant professional acting experience), a mild-mannered elderly nomad she had seen earlier in Arizona.  They go on to meet on several further occasions, and Dave politely indicates to Fern that he is interested in having her stay with him in a long-term relationship.  But ultimately Fern resists the temptation and decides to stick to her life of independence on the open road.

There is also an occasion when Fern’s van has a serious breakdown, and she has to go ask her married sister in California for a loan in order to pay for the repairs.  When Fern goes to her sister’s upper-middle class home, we can see the contrast in the two sisters’ lifestyles; and we hope the encounter will shed some light on the taciturn Fern’s background.  But it becomes clear that the sister has always been as much in the dark about Fern’s thoughts and feelings as we viewers are now.  Anyway, the sister does loan the money to Fern, and the van gets fixed.

Fern has further encounters with Bob Wells and other van-dwelling nomads, before eventually returning for one last nostalgic visit to Empire, Nevada, which is by this time almost a ghost town.  Then at the end of the film, she heads back out on the road.

So overall, Nomadland is a bleak, moody film that effectively conveys inescapable feelings of loneliness and a sense of loss.  But there are three connected thematic elements in the film that linger in my mind and warrant further comment:

• Is the Gig-Economy the Future of Labour?
• What Role Does Narrative Play in Nomadland?
• To What Degree is a Self Defined by Narrative?
  

These are not items really explicitly addressed in Nomadland, but they were tangentially evoked when I watched the film.

1.  Is the Gig-Economy the Future of Labour?

Watching Nomadland made me wonder whether the traditional nature of U.S. socioeconomic society is collapsing (and since the U.S. is at the forefront of social evolution, this applies eventually to everywhere else, too).  With management increasingly centralized and specific jobs increasingly objectified and compartmentalized, the labour environment is more and more moving towards a gig-economy.  For digital workers, this can mean more and more digital nomads – people who can perform their jobs from remote locations and can therefore live anywhere.  But for hands-on gig workers, such as those depicted in Nomadland, it means that anyone looking for work must travel to the site of the job location and secure the gig-job.  In other words, they have to be nomads.

The positive side to all this is that there are likely to be available jobs for itinerants.  But of course the downside is that the jobs are reduced to lowest-common-denominator specifications and are often low-skilled and low-paid.

Chloé Zhao doesn’t take up this general social issue and its ramifications at all in Nomadland.  But what she does show is the lifestyles of the nomads and their various ways of dealing with the inherent loneliness in “nomadland”.

2.  What Role Does Narrative Play in Nomadland?

Almost all films (as well as dramas, stories, and novels) have a narrative that provides a structure for the events depicted.  The metastructure of these narratives is often characterized metaphorically as a journey.  There are one or more protagonists on such a “journey” who are struggling to reach a desired “destination”, and there are usually other agents along the way who assist or stand in the way of progress.  Much has been written about the narrative-as-journey metaphor [8,9,10,11,12], notably the more formalized characterization of it known as the “hero’s journey” [13] that was popularized by Joseph Campbell [14].

In the present context concerning Nomadland, we don’t have to delve into the various narrative characterizations, because in this case, I don’t see that the film even has a narrative.  Although one might at first think Fern is on some sort of journey, neither the destination nor the overall scheme of that journey is ever specified.  We never know what the wandering Fern wants or is thinking.  All we get is a random sequence of scenes depicting haphazard encounters that have no clear outcome – at least no outcome with respect to a given quest.  We never really learn much about what goes on inside Fern’s head or indeed who she is.  But then maybe that is the point.  Fern’s lack of a narrative is what this film is about.

3.  To What Degree is a Self Defined by Narrative?
It is often claimed that we basically model all the people we meet in terms of the narratives we construct about them, and this is how we come to know and understand them [9,10,11].  We even think of ourselves in terms of the narratives constructed by ourselves and others about ourselves.  So is it really true; is that all there is to the self – the narrative that has been constructed to characterize it?  Are you and I just the stories we have constructed about ourselves?  There is dispute on that score.

Some philosophers, usually objectivists, maintain that, yes, that is all there is to the self – the narrative story (or stories) that provides a comprehensible, temporally-oriented scheme of who you are.  They argue further that any idea that there is some inner being constituting the true self is a self-deceptive hallucination.  The only existing selves, they insist, are the fabricated narratives that have long been constructed (since caveman days) to facilitate human interactions extended over time.

But there are other thinkers, both esteemed Western philosophers [15] and respected Eastern sages [16,17], who hold that there are really two essential aspects of the self:

• an outer, worldly, narrative-based self 
• an inner self that is founded on core-consciousness
  

According to this second, more nuanced scheme, it is the inner, core-consciousness-based self that is the true being that identifies who you are.  And this is the self-perspective that I find more natural, and I would guess that Chloé Zhao thinks this way, too.  It usually follows under this scheme that when a person’s inner core-consciousness gets the feeling that its constructed narrative-based self is somehow unfulfilling and leaves it disconnected from meaningful interactions in the world, it then feels alienated.  This sense of alienation can be difficult to articulate, but it lies as a root element of existentialist thinking, and it has been eloquently expressed by such writers as Albert Camus [18] and Jean-Paul Sartre [19], as well as in a number of memorable films [20].  And it is Fern’s alienation that is the artistic key to Nomadland.

As I mentioned, the film Nomadland doesn’t really seem to have its own narrative, and that comes down to the fact that the film’s main character, Fern, doesn’t appear to have a narrative-based self at all.  It’s not just an unsatisfactory narrative-based self, as it often is with some people; here in Fern’s case, it is a virtual narrative void.  She doesn’t appear to have had much meaningful interaction with her family when she was growing up.  And now that her husband has died and she has lost her longtime job and home, there is nothing left of her adult life on which to base her narrative self.  Her life is empty.  And that is what makes the film problematic.  Can a film succeed without being driven by a narrative journey?  In the case of Nomadland, I would say it more or less does succeed.   

Even though I am aligned with the philosophical position that the narrative self is not the most intrinsic aspect of the self, having only a severely diminished narrative-based self, like Fern, would be an existential problem.  And it is Fern’s existential problem that is on display in Nomadland.  We viewers want to know more about what Fern is thinking and feeling in response to her barren circumstances, but her contemplative reticence gives us little to chew on and leaves us wanting more.  Frances McDormand’s subtle, laid-back performance as Fern is crucial here.  We follow her gaze and guess about her feelings all the way, but our fascination persists.  And that is what lies at the heart of Nomadland.

★★★½

Notes:

1. A.O. Scott, “‘Nomadland’ Review: The Unsettled Americans”, The New York Times, (18 February 2021, 26 April 2021).   
   
2. Brian Tallerico, “Nomadland”, RogerEbert.com, (19 February 2021).   
   
3. Beatrice Loayza, “Nomadland finds beauty on the rugged, ruthless open road”, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (28 April 2021).   
   
4. MaryAnn Johanson, “Nomadland movie review: ain’t that America”, flick filosopher, (6 May 2021).   
   
5. Murtaza Ali Khan, "’Nomadland’ Review: An inspiring tale of survival that presents the modern-day American West in a new light”, A Potpourri of Vestiges,, (4 April 2021).   
   
6. Marjorie Baumgarten, “Nomadland”, The Austin Chronicle, (19 February 2021).   
   
7. Chris Barsanti, “Review: ‘Nomadland’ Is a Sorrowful Lament for Lives on America’s Fringes", Slant Magazine, (12 September 2020).   
   
8. Roger Schank and Gary Saul Morrison, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Rethinking Theory),  (1990), Northwestern.
9. Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of Reality", Critical Inquiry, 18:1, 1-21, (1991).
10. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, Narrative Intelligence (2003), Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers (eds.), John Benjamin Publishing Co.
11. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vols. I- III, (1983-1985), University of Chicago Press. 
12. Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 2nd Edition, Michael Wiese Productions (1998).
13. “Hero’s Journey”, Wikipedia, (17 September 2021).     
    
14. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1st edition, Bollingen Foundation (1949), 2nd edition, Princeton University Press (1990), 3rd edition, New World Library (2008).
15. Dan Zahavi, "Self and Narrative: the Limits of Narrative Understanding", Narrative  and  Understanding  Persons, D. D. Hutto  (ed),  Royal  Institute  of  Philosophy Supplement 60, Cambridge University Press, pp. 179-201, (9 August 2007).  
    
16. Paramahansa Yogananda, God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita, Self-Realization Fellowship, (1 September 2001).  
17. Ching Hai, I Have Come to Take You Home: A Collection of Quotes and Spiritual Teachings from the Supreme Master Ching Hai, Sophie Lapaire and Pamela Millar (eds.), SMCHIA Publishing Co., (1 January 1995).   
18. Albert Camus, The Stranger (L'Étranger), Gallimard, (1942).  
19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (La Nausée), Éditions Gallimard, (1938).
20. The Film Sufi, “Existentialism in Film 1", The Film Sufi, (15 July 2008).   
    

“The Spirit of the Beehive” - Víctor Erice (1973)

The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la Colmena, 1973) is a Spanish drama with a haunting flavour that sets it apart from almost all other films.  It is a story concerned with imagination, in particular the rich, fertile narrative imaginations that most children are endowed with.  This outstanding film was the inaugural directorial effort of Víctor Erice, who, regrettably, has gone on to direct only one other feature fiction film (El Sur, 1983).  Based on the cinematic skills on display here in The Spirit of the Beehive, Erice deserved to have a long and prolific career in feature filmmaking.  

Other specific aspects of the film’s overall production values are also excellent, with a fascinating original story by Erice and Ángel Fernández Santos, emotive cinematography by Luis Cuadrado, meaningful evocative editing by Pablo González del Amo, and atmospheric music by Luis de Pablo.  In particular, there is a lot of symbolic dynamic imagery, such as the liberating feelings evoked by showing steam trains rapidly moving across the countryside (an image frequently invoked by great filmmakers), that contribute to the film’s poetic canvas.  The result was a film whose reputation has grown steadily over the years [1,2,3,4,5] and is now considered by many to be the greatest Spanish film ever made [2].

The story of The Spirit of the Beehive is set in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in the small town of Huelos on the Spanish Castilian plateau.  By 1940 the victors in the civil war, the right-wing forces led by Francisco Franco and supported by the German Nazis, having defeated the progressive Republican government, were fully in power.  Franco would remain in power until 1975, so The Spirit of the Beehive was made while Spain was still under the Francoist regime. Although the Spanish Civil War provides a background political and social context for some events in the film, nevertheless, I do not believe that that aspect should be overemphasized.  It is just one element that colours the thinking of the two principal adult characters in the film.  

The events in the film are centred around a family of four who live in a fading manor house in Huelos:

• Fernando (played by Fernando Fernán Gómez, the only professional actor in the film) is an elderly gentleman apparently in his fifties who is something of a scholar.  He spends much of his time studying and writing about bees, and he has his own apiary for this purpose.
   
  
• Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) is Fernando’s much younger (thirtyish) and very attractive wife.  She spends much of her ample free time (they have a full-time maid) longing for and writing love letters to her absent paramour, who was a Republican soldier and now may be a refugee.
   
  
• Ana (Ana Torrent) is Fernando’s and Teresa’s shy and impressionable six-year-old daughter.  She is the main character of this story.
   
  
• Isabel (Isabel Tellería) is Ana’s older sister by one or two years.  Isabel is a good-natured but naughty girl who relishes playing tricks on her innocent and gullible younger sister, Ana
  

All four of these characters live to some degree in isolation from others, and so they have concocted dreamworlds to occupy their imaginations.  

• Fernando is obsessed with speculations about his bee colony and how the constant agitation on the part of the worker bees seems to be ultimately pointless.  He can artificially stimulate these bees to be even more agitated without their apparently being aware of it.  And he sees this as a metaphor for the purposelessness of all life, including human existence.
   
  
• Teresa lives in her own dreamworld of lost love.  She is not intimate with her husband, Fernando, and prefers her dreamworld to the real world in front of her.
   
  
• Isabel concocts dreamworlds of silly games she likes to play with her schoolmates and false stories she tells to Ana.
   
  
• Ana’s dreamworld, which is the main focus of the film, is, as I will discuss further, different from the others, because she doesn’t see it as a dreamworld.  She sees it as an opportunity to have authentic, meaningful engagement with another person who seeks her company and could enrich her life.
  

The Spirit of the Beehive narrative passes roughly through three main phases.

1.  The Family’s Dreamworlds

In 1940 a travelling cinema projection team has come to Huelos to setup their projector in the town hall and show the film Frankenstein (1931) to the locals.  All the kids, including Isabel and Ana, are excited about seeing the film and flock to the makeshift projection theater.  Meanwhile Fernando is shown immersed in attending to his bee colony.  And his wife, Teresa, is shown at home writing a forlorn love letter to her distant lover, whose current circumstances are unclear.

While watching Frankenstein, Ana becomes particularly fascinated with a scene in which Frankenstein’s Monster befriends a young girl of about Ana’s age and winds up accidentally drowning her.  Later that night when Ana and Isabel are in their bedroom, Ana wants her sister to explain to her why the Monster killed the young girl and why the villagers then killed the Monster.  Isabel, who delights in fooling her gullible younger sister, tells her that the Monster was not killed and in fact she has seen him living in an abandoned farmhouse nearby.  She also tells Ana that the monster is really a spirit and cannot be killed.  She adds that the Monster only comes out at night, but if you’re his friend, you can talk to him anytime – just say “It’s me, Ana”.

Ana fully buys into Isabel’s story and becomes obsessed with finding this spirit so that she can become its friend.  Clearly the innocent Ana has been bewitched by the tender scene between the girl and the Monster she saw in the movie, and she wants to find the spirit and become its friend.

2.  Ana and Isabel

In the next phase we see more of the contrast between Ana and Isabel.  While Ana is innocent and shy, Isabel is devilishly provocative.  And the film artfully shows their distinctive natures by means of natural behaviours.  In particular, Ana’s inherent wonder at the world around her is sensitively displayed by means of her earnest gaze.  

One especially important issue for kids, which they think about all the time, is the subject of death.  Adults, including Fernando and Teresa in this film, assume that death is a matter that is too complex and profound for kids to think about, but they are wrong.  Kids are at least as perplexed and disturbed by death as adults are, and I can remember when I was about Ana’s age often thinking and worrying about death and what it meant.  Certainly Ana and Isabel are not exceptions, and, of course, seeing the movie Frankenstein only fanned the flames of their fascination.

To further expand on her monster story that she told Ana, Isabel takes her sister to the abandoned farmhouse that she mentioned in order to look for the Monster.  Of course, they don’t find anything, but Ana is convinced that the Monster/Spirit must be there at night.  So she later several times sneaks out of her house at night to visit the farmhouse and see if she can find the Monster.   

There are other death-oriented scenes in this section, too.  One shows Fernando taking his daughters out in the forest to warn them about the deadly effects of eating a toadstool.  The thought that such an innocent-looking little plant could have such lethal consequences has a disturbing effect on the quiet Ana.  

In another scene, Isabel is shown experimentally choking the family’s pet cat almost to death in order to explore her fantasies of killing a companion.  Most disturbing of all is a scene in which Isabel convincingly pretends to be dead in front of Ana.  Ana’s attempts to revive her sister are of no avail, and she becomes greatly disturbed.

So for Isabel, life is a set of games.  But for Ana, life is a mystery.

3.  The Monster/Spirit Appears

Later we see a Spanish Republican activist on the run from the Francoist authorities.  He leaps from a speeding freight train, injures his ankle, and manages to limp his way to the abandoned farmhouse, where he seeks temporary refuge out of sight.  That night Ana makes one of her middle-of-the-night inspections of the abandoned farmhouse and encounters the Republican activist, who she takes to be the embodiment of the Monster/Spirit she is seeking.  Ana quickly tries to help her new spirit friend, as she tends to his injured ankle and brings him some food and her father’s coat.  

But when Ana is away, the Francoist police come to the farmhouse and machine-gun the Republican activist to death.  Since the police found Fernando’s coat and pocket watch with the activist when they killed him, they place Fernando under suspicion.  And Fernando, in turn, suspects Ana stole his coat.  

The next time Ana goes to the farmhouse looking for her special spirit friend, she is dismayed to find only bloodstains.  When her suspicious father tracks her there and calls her to come to him, the horrified girl runs away into the fields and disappears from view.

A massive village search operation ensues that engages in looking for Ana through the night, and she is finally found the next day, barely conscious.  Although Ana was physically unharmed, she is now uncommunicative, or so it seems.  Her only attempts at communication now are when she is alone at night and goes to the window and calls out, “it’s me, Ana”.  

So Ana, like her mother and father, ends up isolated and living in a dreamworld.  But their dreamworlds are all different.  Fernando’s dreamworld is one of lonely scientific investigation in order to unlock the objective truths of uncaring nature.  He is despondent over his own pessimistic speculations concerning the absurdity of existence.  Teresa’s lonely dreamworld is one of hopeless and forlorn love for a lover who may no longer even exist.  Ana’s dreamworld, however, is more mystical and more selfless.  She is seeking to reach out and engage with a magical, spiritual other, whose interactive possibilities seem to be thrilling and boundless.  

In fact if we stop to think about it, most of us are, at least unconsciously, in similar shoes.  When we seek God, we are hoping to find profound engagement with a supreme spiritual agency – a dynamic agent-to-agent interaction, not just arrive at some state of lifeless static perfection.  We intuitively feel that life inherently involves interactive dynamism, not stasis, and, like Ana, we are looking for the blissful possibilities of potential interactions that may be out there.  

The Spirit of the Beehive beautifully explores this space in perhaps the only way possible – through the eyes of a sensitive, innocent child.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Nicolas Rapold, “The Depth of a Child's Gaze”, The New York Sun, (27  January 2006).   
   
2. Paul Julian Smith, “The Spirit of the Beehive: Spanish Lessons”, The Criterion Collection, (18 September 2006).  
   
3. Bill Gibron, “Past Perfect: Criterion Classics – The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)”, PopMatters, (28 November 2006).   
   
4. Roger Ebert, "Everything in the movies is fake", Great Movies, RogerEbert.com, (20 November 2012).   
   
5. Acquarello, “The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), 1973", Strictly Film School, (24 December 2017; 8 January 2018).    
   

“Accident” - Joseph Losey (1967)

I consider Joseph Losey to be one of the great British film directors, even though Losey was born and raised in the United States and began his film career in Hollywood in the late 1940a. But Losey’s socialist sympathies soon came into conflict with the emerging anti-communist hysteria associated with McCarthyism in the 1950s [1], and he opted for self-exile in London in 1953, where he resumed his film career.  Losey’s subsequent films in England were what in  my view established him as a great director, particularly his collaborations with famed playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter – The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971).  All of those films are emotive and fascinating psychological dramas, but of these, I think Accident is perhaps relatively misunderstood and underappreciated.  Nevertheless, Accident did receive some accolades, including the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix (the second-most prestigious festival prize after the Palme d'Or).

The story of Accident is based on Harold Pinter’s adaptation of Nicholas Mosley’s 1965 novel of the same name, and it concerns the relationships of an Oxford don and his students.  The Oxford setting of the story is important, but its presence seems to dominate the perspectives of some critics, particularly American.  Thus many of these critics see Accident as mostly concerned with either (a) the British upper-class and associated class prejudices or (b) the peculiarities of the British intelligentsia [2,3,4,5,6].  However, while I believe those thematic elements may be present in this work, the true profundity of the film lies elsewhere.  Of the reviews of the film that I did come across, though, I thought the most insightful one was that of Jugu Abraham [2].

Getting back to the story, itself, the film begins with a static, frontal shot of a stately home removed from the city, after a few seconds of which, the sounds are heard of a horrific auto accident offscreen.  The home’s resident, Stephen (played by Dirk Bogarde), rushes out to the scene of the accident, which involved a single car that ran off the road into a tree.  Stephen apparently knows the two battered young occupants of the car – the driver Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), who is dazed and barely conscious, and the passenger William (Michael York), who is dead.  We will later learn that both of these people were Oxford students whom Stephen was tutoring.

Stephen manages to usher the still-dazed Anna back to his home and lie her down.  When he then reports the accident to the police, he conceals from them that Anna was in the car.  Much of the rest of the film consists of various flashbacks covering things that occurred before the accident.  And we will later learn that the opening crash sequence is also a flashback.
 
These flashbacks do not appear in a linear narrative fashion and have the character of out-of-order, impressionistic psychological recollections, presumably those of Stephen.  As the flashbacks unfold, we learn that Stephen is a fortyish Oxford don who is married with two kids.  His wife Rosalind (Vivien Merchant, the real-life wife of Harold Pinter) is pregnant with their expected  third child.  

As part of the admirable Oxford tutoring system, which enables students to have regularly-scheduled tutorial sessions with the distinguished Oxford faculty members, Stephen has two tutorial philosophy students, William and Anna.  William is an exuberant member of the upper-class and a graduate of Eton who seems to have a very close friendship with Stephen.  The more taciturn Anna is a beautiful young Austrian woman who comes from a titled family.  From Stephen’s perspective, the contrast between Anna and his wife Rosalind couldn’t be more marked.  While Rosalind is a plain, down-to-earth mother and homemaker, Anna is exotically gorgeous and given to quietly giving him alluring glances.

Stephen also has an Oxonian faculty colleague and presumed friend, the similarly-aged family man Charley (Stanley Baker), with whom Stephen feels he is sometimes unfavorably compared.  While Stephen is professionally soft-spoken and modest, Charley is an outgoing, self-advertising egotist who has published some novels and who hosts his own TV talk-show.  Their contrasting natures are fully on display when they are around women.  Stephen is invariably reserved and gentlemanly, even when he is around Anna, to whom he is secretly attracted.  On the other hand, Charley openly flirts with many women, even with Stephen’s wife, Rosalind.  In fact, as I similarly remarked about two characters in Satyajit Ray’s Kaparush (1965), if we were to be more scientific and compare Stephen and Charley psychologically in accordance with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) [7], Stephen would be characterized as INFP (i.e. Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, and Perceiving), and Charley would be characterized as the opposite, ESTJ (Extraverted, Sensing, Thinking, and Judgmental).  

As the story unfolds, William, in one of his private sessions with Stephen, reveals that he is strongly attracted to Anna and wishes to pursue her.  So Stephen suppresses his own emotions for Anna and encourages them to get together.  

In order to be a good guy (and also see more of Anna), Stephen invites both William and Anna to his stately home for an afternoon party.  However, on the day, Charley shows up uninvited and crudely imposes himself on the others present.  Anyway, Stephen does manage to take Anna on a private walk to a nearby orchard, but his timidity prevents him from drawing himself close to her.  Stephen subsequently then invites everyone to stay for dinner, and all the men get very drunk, so they all have to stay over at Stephen's home for the night.  This get-together sequence is particularly interesting, because it shows all the key characters (Stephen, Anna, William, Charley, Rosalind) together and variously interacting.

Later, with Rosalind away in connection with maternity preparations for the birth of their third child, Stephen makes a brief trip to London to see if he can arrange for his own TV appearance.  Nothing comes of that, but while  in London, Stephen looks up an old flame, Francesca (Delphine Seyrig), the Oxford Provost’s daughter.  Stephen hasn’t seen Francesca in ten years, but they still share feelings for each other, and they proceed to go to bed together.  This cameo appearance of Delphine Seyrig can be seen as something of an homage to one of Losey’s favourite directors, Alain Resnais, in two of whose famous films, Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), Seyrig had starred.
 
When Stephen returns to his country home, he discovers that Charley has broken in while Stephen was away so that he could have a sexual tryst with Anna.  Stephen is speechless at what has happened. This is because Anna, for Stephen, is an alluring, elegant princess who represents his romantic ideal.  How could she succumb to such a crude, loathsome creature as Charley?  

Numb with disappointment, Stephen goes off to the kitchen to make himself an omelette, followed by the embarrassed Charley and Anna.  They apologetically try to talk to Stephen, but he remains silent.  This highly charged scene of frustration and non-interaction is my favourite sequence in the film.  Stephen is later further silently horrified to learn that Charley has been sleeping with Anna for some time.

There are other flashback sequences, such as one showing Stephen visiting Charley’s estranged wife Laura (Ann Firbank), another one showing Stephen visiting William’s upper-class house for a party, where the male guests play an indoor version of the Etonian rugby-like wall game, and another sequence showing Stephen watching William and Charley playing in a cricket match.  In all these sequences Stephen seems to be a polite outsider and unable to engage with the social games that are going on.  Although these sequences are probably what inspire some critics to claim that Accident is a film about class, I would say that they are more concerned with the general theme of psychological alienation.  

Finally, Anna rather coldly tells Stephen that, despite her clandestine sexual affair with Charley, she nevertheless intends to marry William.  This is a further disturbing thing for Stephen to learn about Anna’s previously idealized nature.

Then we come around to a flashback of the immediate events surrounding the opening crash scene.  William, excited about his engagement with Anna, tells Stephen he would like to come over to Stephen’s home for a talk after first attending a party he has to go to.  We know from earlier scenes that William tends to drink too much, and on this occasion after the party, he was too drunk to drive.  So Anna had to take the wheel, and it was she who crashed the car in the opening scene.

We now return to that crash scene, at which Stephen found William dead and Anna in a daze.  We now know that Rosalind is away tending to her newborn baby.  After attending to the still-shocked Anna in the bed, Stephen, in an apparent moment of Charley-imitation, tries to force his affections on the woman.  But Anna is unresponsive, and this is not what Stephen sought.  

In the end, Anna returns to Austria, much to the frustrated consternation of Charley.  There seems to be little sorrow expressed over William’s death.  Stephen can only watch.

As I mentioned at the outset of this review, I don’t think Accident is primarily concerned with the British classes or intelligentsia, although those factors do provide a colourful social context to the tale.  What the film does portray are the often-hidden (and never-to-be-forgotten) feelings of romantic longing and guilt.  Anna was the ideal romantic dream for Stephen.  The imagery of Charley sullying this dream was deeply disturbing to Stephen, and the nuanced acting and camerawork effectively conveys this.  In fact throughout the film, Losey’s subtle and affective mise-en-scene immerses the viewer in Stephen’s emotional roller-coaster ride.  And this is what makes Accident a great film.

The final shot of the film again shows a frontal shot of Stephen’s country home.  Things appear to have returned to normal.  But the soundtrack reminds the viewer that the fatal accident will always be a part of Stephen’s memory.
★★★★

Notes:

1. “McCarthyism”, Wikipedia, (16 February 2021).  
2. Jugu Abraham, “165. Self-exiled US director Joseph Losey’s British masterpiece “Accident” (1967): Atrophy and unhappiness of the educated upper crust”, Movies that make you think, (18 July 2014).   
   
3. Peter Keough, “In ‘Accident,’ a mystery and a movie masterpiece”, “The Boston Globe”, (2 October 2014).   
   
4. Richard T. Jameson, “Accident – ‘one of the great modern films’”, Parallax View, (28 March 2011).  
5. Tim Robey, “Eerie film about the skull beneath the skin of genteel English life”, The Telegraph, (5 June 2009).   
   
6. Penelope Houston, “Losey's Hand in Pinter's Glove”, The Spectator, (17 February 1967).   
   
7. “Myers Briggs Type Indicator”, Wikipedia, (27 January 2017).