Based on Noël Coward's play "Still Life" this is a super adaptation from David Lean as Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard meet in a railway station café and 90 minutes later we have been on a roller-coaster of emotions, all delicately and subtly discussed, as these two eminently middle class English people challenge their long established "civilised" values and conventions of behaviour. It's style is it's simplicity - the script is poignant and charming; if a little dated now. Stanley Holloway provides an occasional breath of air during this quite intense drama, and who can ever forget that Rachmaninoff is a huge star of this, too?
Brief Encounter (1945)
Directed by David Lean
David Lean's Brief Encounter tells the story of two married people (Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard) who meet by chance at a railway station and fall into a brief, impossible love affair. The acting is incredible, both leads conveying volumes through restraint and glances. Lean's direction is assured, understanding exactly how to frame repressed emotion and stolen moments.
The cinematography is phenomenal. The lighting and shadows really raised the experience of the film several notches, turning ordinary railway stations and tea rooms into spaces of longing and moral anguish. Every frame is composed with care, the visual language doing as much work as the dialogue.
Too bad the screenplay doesn't age well into current culture. What felt like profound moral conflict in 1945, the agony of choosing duty over desire, now reads as needlessly repressed, the tragedy of two people unable to claim what they want because propriety demands sacrifice. We've moved past the idea that adultery of the heart requires this level of self-flagellation, that wanting something beyond your marriage means you must suffer eternally for the transgression of feeling.
Still, as a technical achievement and a document of its time, Brief Encounter remains worth watching. Just don't expect the emotional stakes to land the way Lean intended.
