cinema review

Brief Encounter depicts the type of sordid love affair in which only the proper English middle class could engage. Director David Lean and writer Noël Coward paint an unflattering portrait of womanhood. Laura betrays her husband in both thought and deed, and the film is an examination of her moral lapse.

Brief Encounter | Pinewood Films, Ltd. | UK | 1945

Technical Details: B&W | 86 Minutes | 1.33:1 | Not Rated

Cast: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey, Cyril Raymond, Everley Gregg, Margaret Barton, Valentine Dyall, Marjorie Mars

Screenplay: Noël Coward, based on his play “Still Life”, with David Lean and Anthony Havelock-Allan (uncredited)

Cinematography: Robert Krasker

Director: David Lean

 

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While Brief Encounter (1945) was popular with audiences and critics alike in its day (it won the Grand Prize at the first Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for three Academy Awards), its status as romantic masterpiece is still undecided. Certainly the film is uncharacteristically unsentimental - and its realism and sexual boldness must have caused a few censors to blush upon the film’s release.

Written by Noël Coward (based on his one-act play “Still Life”) and directed by David Lean (his fourth, and final collaboration with Coward), Brief Encounter tells the story of a married woman, Laura (Celia Johnson), who has a love affair with Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard, in his first starring role), whom she meets on her weekly shopping trip into town over a period of seven weeks.

Brief Encounter was what the studios at the time called a “woman’s picture” (we’d call them “chick flicks” or “date movies” today). Brief Encounter distinguishes itself from similar genre pictures of the time by depicting women not as they are, but as men see them.

Metaphor doesn’t get more obvious than showing a train passing through a tunnel.

Many of Lean’s films include pivotal scenes involving trains. Brief Encounter is no exception. The film opens in a train station, as Laura and Alec prepare to see each other for the last time. The story begins at the end, and the rest of the film is told in flashback as Laura sits in the drawing room of her house with her husband Fred (Cyril Raymond), whose stolidity and predictability act as counterpoint to the more exciting relationship on which the film is centered.

Lean and Coward paint an unflattering portrait of middle class womanhood. Laura betrays her husband in both thought and deed, and the film is an examination of her moral lapse; a lapse which makes the final line of the film bitter and ironic.

Consider the closing dialogue between Laura and her husband Fred:

Fred: Laura?
Laura: Yes, dear.
Fred: Whatever your dream was, it wasn’t a very happy one, was it?
Laura: No.
Fred: Is there anything I can do to help?
Laura: Yes, Fred, you always have.
Fred: You’ve been a long way away.
Laura: Yes.
Fred: Thank you for coming back to me.

Laura’s ‘dream’ (a daydream while listening to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and knitting) was not happy, but not for the reason Fred would think. She was sad not because she was inconstant to her husband, or because she betrayed him, but because Alec, the true object of her affection, was on his way to Africa with his family.

She did not return to Fred’s affection, but is still pining for her lost doctor even after the fact. Were the film not told in flashback through Laura’s daydreaming of her lost love, we may be more forgiving of her transgressions - but seeing that she’s lost all love for her husband and only resents him now paints a picture of Laura as a cold-hearted schemer, and offers her no redemption.

It’s awfully easy to lie when you know you’re trusted implicitly. —Laura

While Fred may be a bit dim-witted and trust his wife implicitly, Lean and Coward depict Laura as the type of woman that cannot be trusted, that says one thing and does another, and that would give up her husband and child for the fickle fancy of another man.

While Laura listens to her music and pines for Alec, Fred settles into his nightly routine of doing the crossword puzzle. It’s interesting, from a dramatic standpoint, to examine the word with which Fred needs help from his wife:

Fred: You’re a poetry addict. See if you can help me over this. It’s Keats. ‘When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face / Huge cloudy symbols of a high _______.’ Something that’s seven letters.
Laura: Romance, I think. I’m almost sure it is. ‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.’ It will be in the Oxford Book of English Verse.
Fred: No, it’s right I’m sure. It fits in with ‘delirium’ and ‘Baluchistan.’

The line of poetry is from Keats’s “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” Keats’s sonnet is immaterial (although it is one of the greatest poems in the English language) to this examination, but the introduction of the word “romance” through Fred’s mundaneness is telling, as is the fact that “romance” fits with “delirium” (and “Baluchistan,” but that seems a bit random, unless you’d care to make something out of recognizing that Baluchistan is a large desert region in western Pakistan. Certainly there are academics among our readers that could make some kind of desert metaphor work - but I am not one of those people, so that digression ends here).

Does Laura’s romance with Alec come from a state of delirium? Surely romance often feels that way, and in Laura’s case her romantic notions could be seen as a confusing cloud of conflicting emotions, were it not for her sober and even-handed narration. No, Laura is not acquitted by means of delirium because her betrayal is premeditated and rational. Her only saving grace, morally speaking, is that she doesn’t hurt her husband by telling him of her affair (although it could be argued that she is hurting her marriage all the more by receding from his affections - at least, it could if Fred showed much affection toward his wife).

Shrews and gossips, all.

The other women in the film are all stereotypes. The old biddy who works at the train station café (Joyce Carey) flirts with the a ticket taker (Stanley Holloway) and then rebukes his advances.

The cat-and-mouse overt sexuality of the lower class characters strikes a bold contrast to Laura and Alec’s polite, English, stiff-upper-lip decorum.

The middle class dance of manners enables the lovers to escalate their romantic fancies while appearing to be acting with propriety. Even when they are discovered by a friend of Laura’s (a friend of the same social and economic class) there appears to be nothing amiss.

Laura’s busybody neighbour Dolly (Everley Gregg) is a particularly hateful character. Not only is she a gossip and loudmouth, but she interrupts Laura and Alec’s goodbyes at the station café. The two lovers are denied a proper sendoff because Laura cannot risk being discovered by a woman who could not keep a secret (or perhaps by any woman). Notice how Lean shows us a closeup of Dolly’s mouth as she continues her idle chattering on the train ride home. As Dolly is the closest thing Laura has to a friend, we can see just how lonely she must be now that Alec is out of her life. Laura’s return home after her brief encounter with the romantic Dr. Alec Harvey is like a funeral march. That their love was unconsummated does not absolve Laura of guilt.

The Apartment Connection

A pivotal scene in Brief Encounter occurs in the apartment of Alec’s friend Stephen (Valentine Dyall). When Stephen returns to catch Alec and Laura in flagrante delicto, Laura is embarrassed by the thought of being discovered and flees out the back door, leaving Alec to try to explain to his friend why he was there (which doesn’t make logical sense due in the flashback structure of the film, since Laura is now imagining something that she didn’t witness - but we may assume that her imagination is developed enough to wonder about Alec and Stephen’s conversation).

Rumour has it that Billy Wilder was so intrigued by the Stephen character that he wrote a film about just such a man (The Apartment, 1960).

Would the lovers have had sex if their prelude to coitus wasn’t interrupted? Perhaps. But the point of their love wasn’t sexual as much as it arose from a mutual understanding and a need to be loved. If the concept of a platonic love affair seems dated to contemporary audiences, the success of Lost in Translation points to the modern equivalent of Brief Encounter - except in the earlier film, the characters are lost not in a foreign land, but in the humdrum mundaneness of their own average lives.

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Jough Dempsey is the editor-in-chief of Cinema Review.