The Best Old-School Romance You’ve Never Seen: David Lean’s ‘Brief Encounter’

February 13, 2012

By Kelley Kawano

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Brief Encounter/Still courtesy of Universal Pictures

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Considered one of the great British films, “Brief Encounter” was the fourth and final screen collaboration between director David Lean and playwright Noël Coward. (The Criterion Collection will release all four productions as a box set, David Lean Directs Noël Coward, next month.) Expanded from Coward’s one-act play Still Life, the film, told in flashback, recounts a platonic love affair between two married people, housewife Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who meet by chance in a train station tearoom. Over the next few Thursdays, the day both come to town — Laura for her weekly shopping, Alec to consult at the local hospital — they conduct a quietly passionate, but finally impossible, romance.

While some later audiences ridiculed the cut-glass accents and old-fashioned values, the picture, released in 1945, appealed to audiences who had an appetite, heightened by wartime, for depictions of decency, self-sacrifice, and honor. Marked as upper-middle-class — married with small children, well-dressed and well-mannered, middlebrow yet educated tastes in books and films — Laura and Alec meet, thrill to a sudden temptation that enriches their weekly routine, agonize heartbreakingly over its future, and, finally, part due to responsibility and family. Their restraint and adherence to duty, narrated almost as a confession by the devastated Laura, is framed as a model of British character and the idealized British life she returns to — tea, needlepoint, the crossword puzzle — the safe, comforting world for which the war was being fought.

Though very different in scope than the momentous epics — “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago” — of Lean’s later period, “Brief Encounter,” which garnered the director his first Oscar nomination, is nevertheless just as cinematically dramatic. Paired with the famous swoony (if sometimes loud) Rachmaninoff-heavy soundtrack, his atmospheric, almost noir-like, use of light and shadow reflects the powerful romantic nostalgia Laura feels as she remembers her affair with Alec. The resulting print, with its velvety blacks and luminous whites, is ravishing. From their first kiss in an empty passageway of the train station to a clinch in an underpass to their tragic parting, Lean gives the economically told love story of these two everyday individuals a heroic grandeur.

For, despite its technical and narrative excellence and the debate it stirs up — Is the tale the product of a bored housewife’s overheated imagination? Is Alec a cad? Is this a camp classic? How do we read the conclusion? — “Brief Encounter” is, in the end, a jewel of a romance. Howard and particularly Johnson, who received an Oscar nomination for her role, are terrific, offering a finely calibrated two-hander that emotionally anchors the film’s intense romanticism. The reassuring normalcy of the pair — both are attractive, but not glamorously so — makes their story more heartfelt and ultimately relatable. Despite the dexterity of Coward’s dialogue, the film really lives in its small gestures — the delight of a sudden glimpse, the emotion of a hand on a shoulder, the longing in Johnson’s eyes — gestures that reveal the opening and then the closing of a new world, the kind of passion that shakes the foundations and elevates ordinary lives to the epic.

Tags: Brief Encounter, Celia Johnson, David Lean, Noel Coward, Oscars, Relationships, Romance, Still Life, Trevor Howard