Sean Burns
It is perhaps a bit rich that the doomed romance in one of cinema’s most beloved tear-jerkers begins with someone getting something in their eye. One can easily imagine screenwriter Noel Coward and director David Lean having a laugh about being so on the nose. (Or in the eye?) Nevertheless, the inciting incident of their Brief Encounter occurs when Cecila Johnson’s Laura Jesson is ophthalmologically agitated on a train platform by errant bit of coal dust from a nearby steam engine. She’s tended to by Trevor Howard’s friendly Doctor Alec Harvey, lending a steady handkerchief hand while passing by the process of his commute.
The trains come and go in Brief Encounter, as they do in nearly every Lean film — he had a thing for choo-choos – carrying missed connections and broken hearts. The slenderest film in the director’s oeuvre, its 86 minutes run less than half the length of Lean’s Dr. Zhivago and more than two hours shorter than Lawrence of Arabia. Brevity is indeed the whole point of this encounter, chronicling a love not meant to last and reverberating throughout film history with contemporary resonances in Before Sunrise, Lost in Translation, The Bridges of Madison County and In the Mood for Love. That speck of coal dust started a whole genre of heartache.
Unlike the glamorous movie stars in Hollywood love stories, our star-crossed lovers are beguilingly ordinary people from Britian’s prewar period. Laura’s a happy, if slightly neglected housewife who takes the train into town to run errands on Thursdays. She usually goes to the pictures to see something romantic when she’s done. He’s a charming fellow, perfectly polite. They keep running into one another at and around the station. A flirtation that becomes a friendship, then deepens into something more. “You know what’s happened to us?” Alec asks dolefully. “We’ve fallen in love.”
Indeed, their passion is photographed almost like an affliction, shot in deep, noir-inflected shadows as Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 thunders on the soundtrack. The bright eyed innocence of their early meetings darkens as the two begin furtively skulking about. Johnson has gigantic, expressive eyes that do more than attract coal dust. Her pained looks border on crazed. The whole picture is framed as Laura’s false confession, with her voice-over narration spilling secrets to her kindly, reliable husband that she’d never dare say aloud. Oblivious to his wife’s roiling desires that only manifest in the classical records she’s always blasting at top volume, he spends most of the time focused on his crossword. (Dude is really into crosswords.)
Coward’s screenplay, an expansion of his one-act play Still Life, is a marvel of construction, beginning with the end of the affair as seen by a noisy, nosy neighbor of Laura’s who has no idea what kind of emotionally volatile farewell she’s just wandered into. Neither do we, until the scene is replayed at the end of the picture. It’s one of the writer’s many canny doublings and repetitions, like how at the station we witness a distorted mirror of our central couple in the stationmaster and the brusque owner of the tea shop where so much of the action takes place, poorly hiding their workplace flirtation. Then there are the trains, always coming and going, including a speeding express with flashing lights reflected on Laura’s face twice, under strikingly different circumstances.
“I believe we should all behave quite differently in a warm climate,” she says at one point. And indeed, this stifled affair might certainly have played out differently in a more hot-tempered environment or era. But this is a veddy British movie about middle class, stiff-upper-lip folks sacrificing their passions for the sake of duty, heeding prior commitments and the social mores of the day. Brief Encounter became an unfashionable object of derision in the freewheeling 1960s – “Make tea, not love” one critic wrote – before such libertinism again fell out of vogue and everyone stopped shagging long enough to recognize what a masterly piece of filmmaking this is. By the time Alec and Laura bid their understated farewells, you’ll probably have something in your eye yourself.
“Brief Encounter” is streaming on the Criterion Channel, Max, and several ad-supported services.
