Brief Encounter

Brief Encounter (1945) is a British film directed by David Lean starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.

Criticism

In her book Noël Coward (Macmillan, 1987), Frances Gray says that Brief Encounter is, "after the major comedies, the one work of Coward that almost everybody knows of and has probably seen; it has featured frequently on television and its viewing figures are invariably high. Its story is that of an unconsummated affair between two married people.

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"Coward is keeping his lovers in check because he cannot handle the energies of a less inhibited love in a setting shorn of the wit and exotic flavour of his best comedies. To look at the script, shorn of David Lean's beautiful camera work, deprived of an audience who would automatically approve of the final sacrifice, is to find oneself asking awkward questions. A disastrous attempt in 1975 to remake the film in a more up-to-date setting, with Richard Burton and Sophia Loren as Alec and Laura, made this plain." Gray's main argument: Why don't they just go ahead and do it? Why do they feel guilty, watched and hunted all the time? They do not seem to be particularly religious, so what's the problem? For Gray, it is a problem of class consciousness: The working classes can be and also act vulgar, and the upper class silly; but the middle class is or at least considers itself the moral backbone of society (and also has always been Coward's main audience!)--a notion whose validity Coward did not really want to question or jeopardize.

Related Topics:
Remake - Richard Burton - Sophia Loren - Class consciousness - Working class - Upper class - Middle class

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However, Laura (from whose point of view the film is told) makes it clear that what holds her back is her horror at the thought of betraying her husband and her settled moral values, tempted although she is by the force of the love affair. Indeed, it is this very tension which has made the film such an enduring favourite and it rather misses the point to suggest that this is a weakness rather than its most important feature.

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The values which Laura precariously, but ultimately successfully, clings to were widely shared and respected (if not always observed) at the time of the film's original setting (the status of a divorced woman, for example, remained sufficiently scandalous in the UK to cause the King to abdicate in 1936). Updating the story left those values behind and with them vanished the credibility of the plot. That may be why the re-make could not compete. But the film is also widely admired for the beauty of its black and white photography and the atmosphere created by the late steam-age railway setting; both of which were particular to the original David Lean version.

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