Brief Encounter (1945)

Brief Encounter is one of David Lean’s most celebrated early films. I really can’t explain why I have never seen tis movie until now. It has somehow just passed me by.

It was based on a play by Noël Coward who also acted as producer of the film.

The movie opens with a man and a woman parting at a railway station somewhere in England. The woman is clearly very upset. The man will be off to Africa in a week’s time, with his wife and children.

We will soon discover that the woman is Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson). She is a happily married woman. Or at least that’s how she has always regarded herself. So why was she so upset at the railway station and who is the mystery man?

Later that night Laura imagines herself telling the story to her husband Fred (Cyril Raymond). She knows she can never actually tell him the story, except in her imagination.

Her story is told with a voiceover narration. I’m not at all sure that the use of voiceover narration is ever a good idea and I’m certainly not sure it’s a good idea here. I assume the idea is to let us know what Laura’s thoughts are as the story progresses but Celia Johnson is a more than competent actress and I’m inclined to think that she could make us aware of Laura’s emotional state without having to constantly tell us what Laura is feeling. And in fact that’s what Celia Johnson does, making the voiceover narration somewhat superfluous. Mostly she doesn’t tell us anything that isn’t already perfectly obvious. The only reason I can think of for using this technique is to keep reminding us that this is Celia recounting the story in her imagination.

The mystery man is Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard). They met when she got a piece of grit in her eye. Being a doctor he naturally offered to help. It was a very innocent meeting although Laura remembers thinking that he was good-looking and seemed like a very nice man.

They meet again and strike up a bit of an acquaintance, with Alec flirting very openly.

They meet several times, they enjoy each other’s company and of course they fall in love.

This movie does have its overwrought moments and modern viewers might be perplexed by the degree to which the two central characters agonise over their temptations.

Now you do have to bear in mind that this was 1945. British film censorship was in some ways less draconian and in someways more draconian than the Hollywood Production Code but there was certainly no way on earth that anyone in 1945 was going to get away with a movie that condoned adultery. And we know from the opening scene that this love affair is doomed.

The instinct to conform to society’s rules is a universal feature of human nature. It’s as strong today as it was in 1945. The exact nature of the rules changes over time. In 1945 the most important rules concerned sexual behaviour. It’s obvious that these two characters are not going to defy society’s rules. And they believe in those rules.

Since the story is told entirely in flashback we know from the beginning that their love is doomed. It’s the fact that their love is doomed and they know it and the audience knows it that gives Brief Encounter its poignancy. It’s two people having a dream of a great romantic love that can never become a reality. They never really believe that their love has a chance.

Another strength of the movie is the sheer ordinariness of the two protagonists. They’re not kids and they’re not glamorous and they’re really not very exciting people. They’re likeable because they’re so ordinary, and their ordinariness adds to the poignancy. They’re dreaming of the sort of romance that is hopelessly outside the limits of their lives.

Trevor Howard is very good. I think Celia Johnson’s performance would have been much more effective without the voiceover narration. It’s overwrought enough as it is.

One thing that is noticeable is the total lack of erotic tension. This is an amazingly chaste flirtation. Of course the censorship climate was very restrictive at the time but other British movies of this period (the Gainsborough melodramas for example) do manage to at least hint at eroticism. There’s none of that in Brief Encounter. I assume that David Lean had the final say in casting the leads (given that Celia Johnson had been in two of his previous movies that seems a reasonable assumption) and it’s almost as if Lean chose his leads deliberately for their lack of erotic appeal. I guess he was aiming at a dreamlike romanticism but even so this is an unbelievably unsexy love story.

The movie’s running time is only 86 minutes but it feels padded out, probably not surprising given that it’s based on a one-act play. It would have worked better at around 70 minutes but this was an A-picture and such a short runtime would not have been acceptable. David Lean could be rather ponderous which exacerbates the problem.

This is a movie that requires a special effort to keep in mind that in 1945 the extent to which the protagonists are crippled by guilt and the extent to which they agonise over their situation would not have seemed absurd. One can’t help wondering how viewers seeing this movie on television in the 60s and 70s, in the heyday of sexual freedom and social liberation, must have reacted to this movie. It’s a movie that comes down very strongly on the side of respectability and traditional morality and social conformity and that can be off-putting. Of course one could ask whether the message of the movie is that rigid rules are a good thing, or whether the message is that the two would-be lovers simply have no choice other than to knuckle down under those rules or face social destruction.

When watching Brief Encounter one is aware, to an even greater extent than with most films of its era, that one is visiting a different world. If you make the necessary adjustment the film still packs an emotional punch. Recommended.