The trains come and go in Brief Encounter<\/em>, as they do in nearly every Lean film — he had a thing for choo-choos \u2013 carrying missed connections and broken hearts. The slenderest film in the director\u2019s oeuvre, its 86 minutes run less than half the length of Lean\u2019s Dr. Zhivago <\/em>and more than two hours shorter than Lawrence of Arabia.<\/em> 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<\/em>, Lost in Translation<\/em>, The Bridges of Madison County<\/em> and In the Mood for Love<\/em>. That speck of coal dust started a whole genre of heartache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike the glamorous movie stars in Hollywood love stories, our star-crossed lovers are beguilingly ordinary people from Britian\u2019s prewar period. Laura\u2019s 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\u2019s done. He\u2019s 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. \u201cYou know what\u2019s happened to us?\u201d Alec asks dolefully. \u201cWe\u2019ve fallen in love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, their passion is photographed almost like an affliction, shot in deep, noir-inflected shadows as Rachmaninoff\u2019s Piano Concerto No. 2<\/em> 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\u2019s false confession, with her voice-over narration spilling secrets to her kindly, reliable husband that she\u2019d never dare say aloud. Oblivious to his wife\u2019s roiling desires that only manifest in the classical records she\u2019s always blasting at top volume, he spends most of the time focused on his crossword. (Dude is really into crosswords.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coward\u2019s screenplay, an expansion of his one-act play Still Life<\/em>, is a marvel of construction, beginning with the end of the affair as seen by a noisy, nosy neighbor of Laura\u2019s who has no idea what kind of emotionally volatile farewell she\u2019s just wandered into. Neither do we, until the scene is replayed at the end of the picture. It\u2019s one of the writer\u2019s 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\u2019s face twice, under strikingly different circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI believe we should all behave quite differently in a warm climate,\u201d 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<\/em> became an unfashionable object of derision in the freewheeling 1960s \u2013 \u201cMake tea, not love\u201d one critic wrote \u2013 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\u2019ll probably have something in your eye yourself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Brief Encounter” is streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>, Max<\/a>, and several ad-supported services<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/brief-encounter-still-1024x667.webp\")
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