Brief Encounter

David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) is rightfully regarded as one of the best melodramas ever filmed, and the director's first masterpiece. Although I might argue that Blithe Spirit is his first truly great film, that was mostly due to the source material and the cast. This economical adaptation of Noel Coward's Still Life shows Lean coming into his own as a director. He certainly has help from a talented crew, a fine screenplay and two wonderful leads, but Lean can claim credit for the quality of the overall product. Rarely has a romance film been so brutally, simply honest about its subject matter.

Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) is a typical middle-aged British housewife who meets handsome Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) at a train station. The two bump into each other by accident several times afterwards and continue to see each other, realizing that they've fallen madly in love. Laura tries to keep her affair from her stuffy husband (Cyril Raymond), but finds herself overwhelmed by guilt, unable to look friends and neighbors in the eye. Despite her efforts to break off the affair, Laura finds her feelings for Alec far too strong.

Brief Encounter mostly works on account of its marvellous simplicity. At 86 minutes, it flies by, and aside from the subplot with station work Joyce Carrey and bumptious engineer Stanley Holloway (characters who played a much larger role in Coward's play, but are largely superfluous here), wonderfully focused and free of fat. It is a simple story of two middle aged people seized by something "violent", a feeling of love beyond their control or experience.

The movie's two main characters are wonderfully drawn. Laura is a wonderful mother and loving wife, but finds her boring husband unsatisfying; certainly, compared to her glamorous paramour he's a nonentity. (Their relationship, with him indifferently scribbling in a crossword puzzle while she ponders her infidelity, is almost identical to the Robert Mitchum-Sarah Miles marriage in Ryan's Daughter.) Laura finds herself torn apart, unable to reconcile with her inexorable guilt with her passionate attraction, compounded by her increasing lies and deception to her husband and friends. Alec is a very ambiguous character; as we see him almost entirely from Laura's point-of-view (aside from the brief scene where he tries to hide Laura from a flatmate (Valentine Dyall)), it's hard to tell his motives. Is he genuinely in love with Laura, or does he just see her as a fling? Either way, something is surely there, something that neither knew could exist in real life, and both are shocked by it.

The affair between the two leads isn't really tawdry as such - so far as we can tell Alec and Laura never consummate their relationship, and in that sense it remains "innocent". Still, the poignancy and intensity of their mutual affection is always evident; it's clear that their "middle-class morality" has prevented either from experiencing true affection rather than marriage of necessity, appearance or security. Maybe I'm just a stuffy moralist, but I find the film's ending both sad and wonderfully cheerful - the truly loving husband, not the glamorous, mysterious romantic, gets the woman. He can't satisfy her more passionate wants, but he is who she ultimately "needs" as a husband. This must have been a very pertinent dilemna to Lean, he of the tumultuous private life, and certainly as relatable as Ibsen's A Doll's House to countless couples living in frayed and perhaps loveless marriages the world over.

Lean's direction is extraordinary. After three relatively minor films, he has finely honed his cinematic skills. He shows a marvellous, well-developed camera eye and attention to detail of teh sort that would become his trademark in later years. Robert Krasker's moody, emotional makes striking use of deep focus, shadow and Dutch angles; along with Laura's narration, the film often more reminiscent of a noir rather than a melodrama. The use of an all-Rachmaninoff score is wonderfully realized, adding a poignant, emotional commentary to the proceedings.

The movie also benefits wonderfully from its two leads. Though Celia Johnson had been in two of Lean's early films, she and Trevor Howard were all but unknown at the time. The supporting cast is mostly iffy - Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carrey's "artificial Cockneys" are painfully annoying, Cyrill Raymond and Valentine Dyall are fine but have little screen time - but the two stars easily carry the film themselves, giving marvellously understated and realistic performances.

Celia Johnson is a marvellous actress. In virtually all of her roles she embodied the typical, middle-class British woman, cheerful, devoted, beautiful (if a bit frumpy) and loving, but with a frisson of dissatisfaction and unease. Her shock and mixed emotions about falling in actual love, her guilt, betraying her family, are perfectly and subtly portrayed. She would be largely typecast in this part on film, with The Captain's Paradise allowing her to break out of her assigned role and have some much-needed fun. But it's Laura that she'll be remembered for, and with good reason: this is Johnson's career-defining performance, and her best.

Equally impressive is Trevor Howard. Despite a lengthy career in American and British cinema, appearing in a plethora of classic films (The Third Man, Gandhi), Howard never really got his due as a great actor, yet another sign of cinematic injustice. This is not quite his best performance - his fiercely moral Father Collins in Lean's later Ryan's Daughter or the inept, ruthlessly arrogant Lord Cardigan in the 1968 Charge of the Light Brigade takes that prize - but it's certainly a brilliant, near-perfect turn by an actor then with little experience. He makes Alec ambiguous and uncertain, both romantic and forward, charming yet with an undertone of distrustfulness.

Brief Encounter is not a perfect film by any means, but it's a powerful emotional experience and a fine work of cinematic art. It may not be the best romance ever filmed, but it's certainly deserving of its high reputation.

Rating: 8/10 - Highly Recommended