Brief Encounter (1945)

Film: Brief Encounter

Director: David Lean

Country: UK

Released: November 1945

Runtime: 87 minutes

Genre: Romantic Drama

Studio: Eagle-Lion

Influenced: Robert Altman, Kenneth Branagh, Richard Gere, Alan Bennett, Zhu Wen

Brief Encounter is the Noël Coward play most people don't realise they've seen. David Lean took Coward's 1936 play Still Life and gave it new life in postwar Britain and around the world. Brief Encounter is a classic example of cinematic storytelling, combining a tender but forbidden love story with Lean's simple yet powerful visual style. The film follows the story of Laura (played by Celia Johnson), a housewife in an unhappy marriage, and married GP Alec (played Trevor Howard) who meet in a railway station café. For a country obsessed with its stiff upper lip, it was a glorious opportunity for British audiences to experience what nearly losing that stiff upper lip might feel like.

Lean's direction of this intimate tale uniquely combines technical skill and emotional insight, using subtle camera techniques to convey the characters' longing for each other. He often frames them in close-up or uses a slowly approaching camera to emphasise their feelings, while also employing cross-cutting between scenes to highlight their physical separation. What enhances the film's visual style is Lean's masterly attention to detail, using light and shadow with care to create an emotional atmosphere, backed by a romantic and haunting score by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

One thing I find so interesting about the film is how it uses some of the elements of film noir (light & shade, narrative voiceover) but in pursuit of a different mood, romantic not threatening. The film is also filled with beautiful visuals of nature, from the rolling fields and meadows of the glorious English countryside, to the foggy train station in which the couple meet (and say goodbye). Through these visuals, Lean conveys a sense of the grandness of love and its ability to transform life's most mundane moments into something transcendent.

Brief Encounter is an exploration of the power of love and its potential to overcome class and social convention, and even the law. Such is the resonance of the film that it came to represent all types of forbidden love and infidelity, appealing not just to women who were experiencing increasing sexual freedom in the post-war period but also to gay men such as Coward himself. Interestingly, Coward and Lean took the decision not to let Laura and Alec consummate their love, instead using soft-focus cinematography to keep them trapped in a permanent dreamlike state of longing and desire.