Brief Encounter

"How odd of you to notice you were living with a stranger in the house"

David Lean caused a bit of a stir with this film back in the mid-'40s. He'd already made a couple of films in the early '40s, but none had previously achieved the impact that Brief Encounter had. With it's underlying themes of middle class values and taboos, Brief Encounter fights a quiet battle between appealing to a predominantly middle-class British audience and daring to address the ironclad value system that kept this same class insolvent. Lean takes a one-act play as the basis for this small scale film, and pours all his youth and energy into making it as dynamic as possible - utilising conversational second person narration, extreme close ups, off-kilter camera angles, and non-linear storytelling. In a way, it's his Reservoir Dogs.

Laura (Celia Johnson) is a middle class married woman whose chance encounter with a dashing, erudite doctor (Trevor Howard) leads to an awakening of passion that sends her into a spiral of depression and panic. Her moral foundations are shaken to the core, causing her a great deal of distress as she imaginarily relates the tale to her unwitting, good-natured and unadventurous husband (Cyril Raymond). Laura is a woman standing on the cusp of transgression, she and her doctor fall in love but are yet to act on it, and Brief Encounter famously relates the tale in flashback - wistful, despondant, guilty, and sad. It's a story in vignettes, gathering context like a train gathering speed, and lending weight to Laura's social treachery.

"(We) crept out of the theatre, as though we were commiting a crime"

I had to catch myself a few times, I almost thought that Laura was actually commiting a crime in the legal definition of the term - such is the uptight 1940s context of this film and the society that created it. The inherent repression of the English middle class was so widespread and ingrained in British culture in the 1940s that even daring to admit the possibility of extra-marital love was quite scandalous. This was an era in film that forbade unpunished adultery on the screen (this was even enforced in America by the Hays Code), so it's quite surprising for this film to not depict Laura and Dr. Alec as villains.

It probably also helps that the film is brilliantly conceived, structured and edited. The combination of Lean and Noel Coward with the train station setting and all that steam and smoke is simply iconic. The steam is symbolic of the fog of immorality that descends upon the characters, or a metaphor for Laura's judgement becoming clouded. Lean also heightens the sense of scandal by cutting away the first few times the secretive couple kiss, and offers us a ghost of a devilish smile on Laura's face - which is tellingly shown only via her reflection in the train window, thus representing the intangible possibilities that are just out of her grasp. It's all these masterful little touches that build such a vivid picture of the characters.

I have to say that I didn't much like Celia Johnson's performance as Laura, but maybe I just generally wasn't a fan of the character's constant self-loathing (which can seem a little melodramatic when viewed from a more modern context). In general this film becomes something less than the some of its parts when viewed outside of the context of 1940s England, and the main reason it stays afloat beyond this era is that it happens to be a little atmospheric snapper that demonstrates all of David Lean's visually iconic inventiveness.

DIRECTOR: David Lean
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame. Based on a play by Noel Coward.
KEY ACTORS: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey, Cyril Raymond, Everley Gregg, Valentine Dyall

RELATED TEXTS:
- The one-act play Still Life, written by Noel Coward in 1936. This was part of a cycle of plays written by Coward called Tonight at 8:30.
- The film was re-adapted as the play Brief Encounter in 2008, and as an opera of the same name in 2009.
- Brief Encounter; a TV remake of the film in the '70s that starred Richard Burton and Sophia Loren.
- The '80s film Falling in Love is very much a modernised American version of the same story (even down to the inclusion of trains).

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Actress (Celia Johnson), Best Director and Best Screenplay.
Cannes Film Festival - won Grand Prize of the Festival.