Brief Encounter is back in cinemas again, this time for the 70th anniversary, and to paraphrase what Ken Tynan said about Look Back in Anger: I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see it, again and again. This is the masterpiece of writer-producer Noël Coward (based on his one-act stage-play Still Life) and a jewel in the filmography of director David Lean – an atypically intimate chamber piece for Lean, yes, but the soaring music of Rachmaninov is where the epic sweep comes in.
Celia Johnson is Laura, a married woman who falls in love with Alec, the idealistic married doctor, when he gallantly removes a piece of grit from her eye at a railway station. (A brilliantly oblique and subtextual premonition of suppressed tears, I’ve always thought.) This movie was conceived in a place and time when self-sacrifice for the sake of marriage made unchallenged moral sense. Nowadays, we have a new narrative piety which demands that, whatever secrets are routinely kept in real life, marital infidelity in the movies must always be discovered, and sobering life lessons learned. Not in 1945. Merely to have had these feelings, and then to have renounced them, confers upon Alec and Laura a romantic, and even tragic, grandeur.
The film struck a deep chord with wartime Britain, where a buttoned-up population had (secretly) discovered living for the moment in brief encounters — and, of course, Coward may have heterosexualised his feelings as a pre-Wolfenden gay man, when brief encounters in railway stations meant something different. This, too, lends depth and richness to a wonderful film.
