u.k. drama
1946
bw 86 min.
Director: David Lean
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1400L
Brief Encounter was the fourth and final film that David Lean
made in association with Noel Coward, and can be considered the first
definitive Lean film. Derived from Still Life, a one-act play
which Coward included in the portmanteu Tonight at 8:30, the
story tells of an ordinary suburban housewife, Laura Jesson, who by
chance meets a doctor, Alec Harvey, at the end of one of her weekly
shopping trips to town. As she stands on the platform waiting for her
train, an express roars past and throws a piece of grit into her eye
which Alec removes. They meet again the following week; they then have
lunch, go rowing on the lake, visit the cinema and go driving in the
country. They are, obviously, deeply in love. Then Alec borrows a
friend's flat and the friend returns unexpectedly; overcome by guilt,
they agree to part without having consummated their relationship. At
the station buffet, where they take their separate trains home, Alec
announces that he will move to Africa. Laura slips back to her
suburban home and the husband whose only evident concern is a
crossword puzzle.
Lean begins at the end, with the parting, and slowly introduces an
intricate series of flashbacks, or reveries, which are narrated by
Laura. It is her story, but what sort of story is it? On its initial
release, Brief Encounter was hailed as a groundbreaking piece
of realism and, to be sure, the performances by Celia Johnson and
Trevor Howard, in his first starring role, are exquisitely judged,
their actions entirely plausible. They are not "movie people," and the
world they live in is resolutely ordinary.
The emphasis on the "realism" of Brief Encounter caused it
to go from success on release to an object of derision in the
'60s. Realist films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
regularly featured working-class adulterers, and a few years later,
films such as Tom Jones, the James Bond escapades, and The
Knack espoused sexual liberation and casual sexual encounters. One
critic writing in the '60s defined the message of Brief
Encounter as "Make tea, not love," and recalled how an art-house
audience in 1965 jeered at Alec and Laura's middle-class torments.
In more recent years, the emergence of a less promiscuous sexual
climate, together with the critical rehabilitation of Lean, has turned
Brief Encounter into a much-loved classic. It is, perhaps, even
the British Casablanca, and has been similarly parodied. A
long-running TV advertisement restaged the parting of Alec and Laura
at the railway station; a film student made a short entitled Flames
of Passion, the trailer of which Alec and Laura see at the cinema;
and Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto can always be relied upon to
evoke not only Lean's film but an entire set of emotional values. In
the northern town of Carnforth where th film was made (the wartime
black-out made filming in Southern England impossible), there are even
"Brief Encounter Tours." In America, Brief Encounter was
the subject of a sketch by Mike Nichols and Elaine May, whilst Billy
Wilder found Alec's friend, who loans the flat, so interesting that he
made an entire film about just such a character: The
Apartment. And more recently, Nora Ephron used the movie for
inspiration in Sleepless in Seattle.
But to regard Brief Encounter as realism is a dead end. A
more fruitful approach is to assume that the theme is delirium--the
word that fits with "romance" in the crossword that Laura's husband is
doing. Laura's house, the station buffet (where the manager and the
guard indulge in an imagined affair of their own), and other interiors
are oppressively dreary; the way Lean photographs their meetings in
the dark and shadowy station passageways, where Alec steals a furtive
look, irresistibly conjures film noir and its associations with doomed
love and characters trapped within a repressive social system.
Brief Encounter is also the principal link between the
small-scale films of Lean's early career with the widescreen epics of
his final phase. The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of
Arabia, Ryan's Daughter, and A Passage to India each
have central characters who are prone to a dreamy romanticism which
borders on hysteria and hallucination. Look at Miss Quested (Judy
Davis) at the end of A Passage to India, after her fantasy of
rape in the Marabar Caves, and look at Laura at the end of Brief
Encounter: they are the same person. As Laura's husband does his
crossword, Laura does her embroidery and conjures up this handsome
doctor and overlays her fantasy with Rachmaninov, the music colouring
the inner life of this outwardly monochrome heroine. Laura's surrender
to romantic fiction and music almost turns her into Milford Junction's
Anna Karenina, standing as close as she can to the platform's edge as
the train rushes by. (In One Woman's Story, Lean did have a
heroine attempt suicide in this manner.)
"You've been a long way away," says Laura's husband at the
end. And she has. "I believe we should all behave quite differently in
a warm climate," she says to Alec after he announces his intended move
to Africa. Condemning Laura to a life of conformity and emotional
suppression, Lean sets his own course towards the far horizon, where
the English go out in the midday sun. Brief Encounter is not
only Lean's finest statement on the suffocating world into which he
was born, it is also his train ticket out. Seen today, Brief
Encounter is perhaps quite literally, a dream of England long
ago. And if aspects of it have entered the mythology and cliché
of the British cinema, more than enough remains in this complex film
to move and fascinate us still. Indeed, one famous British columnist
and wit, Cyril Connolly, suggested that Alec was not a doctor at all
but a mental patient who was allowed out of hospital once a week and
preyed on solitary women. Now, there's a thought!
--Adrian Turner
Credits
Directed by: David Lean
Produced by: Noel Coward
Written by Noel Coward, David Lean, and Anthony Havelock-Allan, based on Noel Coward's play Still Life
Photographed by Robert Krasker
Editor: Jack Harris
Sound: Stanley Lambourne and Desmond Dew
Music: Sergei Rachmaninoff (Piano Concerto No. 2)
Music director: Muir Mathieson conducting the National Symphony Orchestra
Piano soloist: Eileen Joyce
Production managers: Anthony Havelock-Allen and Ronald Neame
Transfer
Brief Encounter was transfered from a 35mm composite fine-grain
master in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1.