"There is nothing to keep her here."
"She loves me."
Rooms darkened by overflowing bookshelves, tables alongside tables, and mantelpieces loaded with ornaments, ashtrays, lamps, glasses and bottles; an enclosed tennis court surrounded by overgrown flowerbeds; the claustrophobia of an overturned car. Joseph Losey's Accident is designed to push people close to one another and make them fight for limited space. One idyllic summer afternoon, a professor is invited on a boat ride with two of his students: a beautiful “Austrian princess” and her high-achieving boyfriend. He jumps in next to her and his eyes soon dart around her body: legs, chest, neck, face. He’s enthralled by her, and is emboldened to impress her by swinging from a tree overhanging the water. But, of course, he falls in. Her boyfriend, propelling the punt with a pole, laughs, his show of strength having defeated his professor's. Humiliated and soaked through, the professor bashfully returns to his office to change clothes as his students walk hand in hand behind him. The failure to understand that physical closeness doesn’t equate to intimacy will always be the undoing of men.