Brief Encounter
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Brief Encounter (1945) is a British film directed by David Lean starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.
The screenplay was written by Noel Coward based on his play "Still Life" (1936), one of a group of ten short plays entitled Tonight at 8:30, designed to be performed in various combinations of three (triple bills) as vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and Coward himself. All scenes of "Still Life" are set in the refreshment room of a railway station (the fictional Milford Junction).
The film version prominently features the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff on the soundtrack. Much of the film version was shot at Carnforth in Lancashire. Noel Coward makes the station announcements in the film.
It shared the 1946 Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1999 it came 2nd in a BFI poll of British films, while in 2004 the magazine Total Film named it the 44th greatest British film of all time. Derek Malcolm included the film in his 2000 column The Century of Films.
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Synopsis
Image:BriefEncounter-TrainWindow.jpg
This is the story, told in the first-person, of Laura Jesson, a country housewife. Bored with the security of her husband and family, Laura goes into town once a week for shopping and a matinee picture. On one of her weekly excursions, she accidentally meets Dr. Alec Harvey in the waiting room of the railroad station. Both are early middle-aged, married, and have two children each.
Enjoying one another's company, they continue to meet weekly for coffee in the waiting room of the station while they await their respective trains home. They are soon dismayed to find their innocent and casual relationship quickly developing into love. For a while, they continue to meet furtively in cafes and cinemas, constantly fearing chance meetings with friends. After several meetings, they go to a room belonging to a friend of the doctor's, but their meeting is interrupted by the friend's unexpected return. Realizing that a future together is impossible and wishing not to hurt their families, they agree to part. The doctor is to leave for Africa.
During their final meeting in the train station, while they sit waiting for Alec's train, Dolly Messiter, a talkative friend of Laura's, joins them and is soon chattering away, totally oblivious to the couple's inner misery. As they realize that they have been robbed of the chance for a final goodbye, Alec's train arrives. With Dolly still chattering away, Alec departs with a last look at Laura. As the train is heard pulling away, Laura suddenly dashes out onto the platform. The lights of the passing train flash across her face as she conquers her impulse to commit suicide; she returns home to her family.
Comparison with the play
As is quite usual with films based on stage plays, the film shows most of the places which are only talked about in the play: Dr. Lynn's flat, Laura's home, a cinema, a restaurant and a branch of Boots. Additionally, a number of scenes have been added which are not mentioned in the play: a scene on a lake in a rowing boat where Dr. Harvey gets his feet wet; Laura wandering about alone in the dark, sitting down on a park bench and smoking in public; a drive in the country in a borrowed car.
Certain scenes are made less ambiguous and more dramatic in the film:
- The "explicit" scene where the two lovers are about to commit adultery is toned down. In the play it is left for the audience to decide whether they actually have sex or not. In the film, Laura has only just arrived at Dr. Lynn's flat when its owner comes home, and she is immediately led out by Dr. Harvey via the fire escape.
- When Laura wants to throw herself in front of an express train, the film confirms her intention by means of voice-over narration, but "she fails to take the Karenina way out and walks back to the buffet" (Frances Gray).
The film uses narrative techniques like frame stories and voice-over: the ending of the story is right at the beginning of the movie, which is then repeated at the end; and there is voice-over with Laura addressing her husband, or rather Laura imagining addressing her husband, in a dream-like state.
Criticism
In her book Noël Coward (Macmillan, 1987), Frances Gray says that Brief Encounter is, "after the major comedies, the one work of Coward that almost everybody knows of and has probably seen; it has featured frequently on television and its viewing figures are invariably high. Its story is that of an unconsummated [sic!] affair between two married people. [...]
"Coward is keeping his lovers in check because he cannot handle the energies of a less inhibited love in a setting shorn of the wit and exotic flavour of his best comedies. [...] To look at the script, shorn of David Lean's beautiful camera work, deprived of an audience who would automatically approve of the final sacrifice, is to find oneself asking awkward questions. A disastrous attempt in 1975 to remake the film in a more up-to-date setting, with Richard Burton and Sophia Loren as Alec and Laura, made this plain." [pp.64-67] Gray's main argument: Why don't they just go ahead and do it? Why do they feel guilty, watched and hunted all the time? They do not seem to be particularly religious, so what's the problem? For Gray, it is a problem of class consciousness: The working classes can be and also act vulgar, and the upper class silly; but the middle class is or at least considers itself the moral backbone of society (and also has always been Coward's main audience!)--a notion whose validity Coward did not really want to question or jeopardize.
However, Laura (from whose point of view the film is told) makes it clear that what holds her back is her horror at the thought of betraying her husband and her settled moral values, tempted although she is by the force of the love affair. Indeed, it is this very tension which has made the film such an enduring favourite and it rather misses the point to suggest that this is a weakness rather than its most important feature.
The values which Laura precariously, but ultimately successfully, clings to were widely shared and respected (if not always observed) at the time of the film's original setting (the status of a divorced woman, for example, remained sufficiently scandalous in the UK to cause the King to abdicate in 1936). Updating the story left those values behind and with them vanished the credibility of the plot. That may be why the re-make could not compete. But the film is also widely admired for the beauty of its black and white photography and the atmosphere created by the late steam-age railway setting; both of which were particular to the original David Lean version.
References
- Dyer, Richard. 1993. Brief Encounter. London: BFI