David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) is a remembrance of things past, a whirlwind affair told in retrospect. Early in the film, we see Laura (Celia Johnson) sink into an armchair as Rachmaninoff plays on the radio. Across the parlour, a million miles away, her husband Fred (Cyril Raymond) works on a crossword. Laura, in agony, wishes to confess everything that has transpired over the past few weeks: the trains to Milford, the bit of grit in her eye, and the stranger, Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who gently coaxed it free, and how a small intimate gesture was enough to sow the seed of a grand infatuation. It wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was merely love at first sight. Alec and Laura, two married people, keep accidentally colliding, and their seemingly innocent meetings—lunches, films, conversations—become conscious promises to meet again. Within weeks, the two of them find themselves in the throes of an emotional affair.
Brief Encounter is built around this tension, between outward composure and inward tumult. Lean’s decision to dramatize Laura’s innermost feelings through voice-over turns the film into a kind of diary. She reveals everything to us, even as she remains unable to tell those closest to her. The voice-over underscores her isolation, capturing the painful distance between what Laura feels and what she can say. Her narration is juxtaposed with Johnson’s restrained performance, in which the smallest shifts in expression reveal a deep interior life.
Lean uses his camera sparingly. This makes its few movements all the more striking. Consider the moment Laura truly falls for Alec. In a moment of idle conversation, Alec speaks and Lean’s lens slowly pushes in on Laura. Her eyes drop to his lips, then flick quickly back to his eyes, and the Rachmaninoff swells. Nothing has been said aloud, yet everything is different. Lean invites us to consider an unsettling question: how much of love is chosen, and how much is merely timing?
Fitting for this accidental romance, Lean stages nearly everything in what are, essentially, non-places: spaces of transit where no one lingers and nothing is permanent, and where every conversation has a timetable. True intimacy is never really on hand, and the real world never stops interjecting—tinny station announcements ring out like the decrees of a watchful God, and other people are all too ready to voice their suspicions, constantly reminding the lovers that, to the world at large, their bond is something shameful. Laura and Alec don’t consider themselves forged in sin; to deny their feelings would be to deny nature itself. How could something as pure as true love be wrong? The film lets them ask the question but never lets them answer it.
Brief Encounter screens this afternoon, October 10, and on October 23, at Metrograph on 35mm as part of the series “Trains: Local Routes.”
