Brief Encounter

Dir: David Lean

1949

*****

David Lean’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s 1936 one-act play Still Life is still to this day one of cinema’s greatest – and perhaps most tragic love story of all time. It has been adapted into a play, a radio show, an opera and there have been a couple of films but David Lean’s classic is the best remembered. Set just before the war in 1938, it tells the story of Laura Jesson (played by the spellbinding Celia Johnson), a respectable middle-class British woman who is in an affectionate but rather dull marriage. She narrates her story while sitting at home with her husband, imagining that she is confessing the affair she has been having for the past few weeks to him. Like many women of her class at the time, Laura goes to a nearby town every Thursday for shopping and to the cinema for a matinée. One afternoon while returning from one such excursion to the fictional town of Milford, while waiting in the railway station's refreshment room, she is helped by another passenger, who solicitously removes a piece of grit from her eye. The man is Alec Harvey (played by Trevor Howard), an idealistic doctor who also works one day a week as a consultant at the local hospital. Both are in and around their late thirties or early forties in age, both are married and both have children. They run into each other the following Thursday at a restaurant and share lunch together, laughing at the cellist playing in the corner. They then go on to the cinema and are tickled further when they realise that the cellist in the restaurant is now playing the organ at the matinée. Having enjoyed each other's company, the two arrange to meet again, always ending their meetings at the tea room on the train station platform. They are soon troubled to find their innocent and casual relationship quickly developing into something deeper, approaching infidelity. For a while, they meet openly, until they run into friends of Laura and the perceived need to lie arises. The second lie comes easier. They eventually go to a flat belonging to Stephen, a friend of Alec's and a fellow doctor, but are interrupted by Stephen's unexpected and judgmental return (a scene that would be the inspiration for Billy Wilder's 1960 classic The Apartment). Laura, humiliated and ashamed, runs down the back stairs and into the streets. She walks for hours, sits on a bench and smokes, and is confronted by a police officer, with the implication that she could be perceived as a streetwalker. The couple soon realise that both an affair and a future together are impossible. Not wishing to hurt their families, they agree to part. Alec had been offered a job in Johannesburg and had turned it down, so he decides it would be best if he took it after all. Their final meeting occurs in the railway station refreshment room, exactly where and when the film began. As they await a heart-rending final parting, Dolly Messiter, a talkative acquaintance of Laura, invites herself to join them and begins chattering away, 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, Alec departs with a last look at Laura but without the passionate farewell for which they both long. After shaking Messiter's hand, he discreetly squeezes Laura on the shoulder and leaves. Laura waits for a moment, anxiously hoping that Alec will walk back into the refreshment room, but he does not. As the train is heard pulling away, Laura is galvanized by emotion and, hearing an approaching express train, suddenly dashes out to the platform. The lights of the train flash across her face as she conquers a suicidal impulse. She then returns home to her family. Laura's kind and patient husband, Fred, suddenly shows not only that he has noticed her distance in the past few weeks but that he has perhaps even guessed the reason. He thanks her for coming back to him and she cries in his embrace, as does the audience. The direction is pure Lean and the script is Coward gold. It’s unlike any other mainstream film made in the 1940s, it may have the same melodrama as its contemporaries but the subject of adultery was still highly taboo. However, it was critically acclaimed and very popular thanks to how the subject was handled and also because attitudes were changing, people had been through a lot during the war and were becoming more relaxed with their emotions. I think the turning point was the fact that the affair was clearly a loving one but was never consummated. This has been attributed to class consciousness. Basically the working classes can act in a vulgar way, and the upper class can be silly, but the middle class is, or at least once considered itself, the moral backbone of society.  It’s been said that this is a notion whose validity Coward did not really want to question or jeopardise, as the middle classes were Coward's principal audience. However, many of the scenes are made less ambiguous and more dramatic in the film. The scene in which the two lovers are about to commit adultery is toned down in the film, in the play it is left for the audience to decide whether they actually consummate their relationship but in the film it is clear that they do not. In the play the characters at Milford station’s platform tea room, Mrs. Baggot, Mr. Godby, Beryl, and Stanley are very much aware of the growing relationship between Laura and Alec and sometimes mention it in an offhand manner, whereas in the film, they barely take any notice of them or what they are doing, either showing them respect for their privacy or just being oblivious. The final scene of the film showing Laura embracing her husband after he shows that he has noticed her distance in the past few weeks and perhaps even guessed the reason is not in the original Coward play either and much of the film is led by Laura’s narration, rather than speculative ambiguity. It’s hard to imagine the story without the narration, it probably isn’t needed as much as it is used but the moments when Laura is suspicious of other train passengers and the thoughts she as about Dolly Messiter are just brilliant. Coward captured unspoken love and Lean turned it into a masterpiece of cinema. I challenge anyone not to cry now then they hear Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Consistently voted as one of the greatest British film ever made, I would go one further and say one of the greatest of all time ever. Magic and realism dance together in a dreamy noir with a script that is to die for.