Celia Johnson's looks and eyes alone should have got an Oscar for this British Casablanca. However, this film deserves at least four stars, if only due to its ability to use Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto as its emotional backbone without sounding toe-curlingly hackneyed. Indeed, indicative of this film navigating around the usual clichés of melodrama is that the cuckolded husband is treated quite sincerely and not portrayed as the obvious sap so common in similar treatments of 'adultery' plots.
The man [Noël Coward] who wrote it with such insight as a play was homosexual, and there is an unfounded rumor that it was intended to be performed by men.[…]
Lean disliked the comedy scenes, but as producer Anthony Havelock-Allan pointed out, Coward was a skilful theater writer who knew that the story would be intolerably sad without them.
— Kevin Brownlow (Criterion)
"No more laughter... prepare for tears."
This second viewing on New Year's Eve totally ran me over like the last train to Ketchworth…
Some more thoughts:
• Brief Encounter makes it clear that it is Laura (and not Alec) that first escalates the relationship from more than a coincidental acquaintance from the encounters at the two cafés.
• When Laura learns that her son has been in an accident whilst she was at the cinema with a man who wasn't her husband (which incidentally, from the Gods point of view, obviously wasn't an accident…), Laura rushes to her son's side with genuine sincerity.
• What drives this romance is Alec himself, and it is crucially not fueled by either of them believing it to be 'forbidden'.
• Like the assumed viewer of the film, the friend of Alec who discovers a woman has been in his flat with Alec clearly doesn't approve of the affair in principle (although he is unnecessarily cruel in scolding Alec). But nor does he finger Alec as a serial cheater either. Clearly, the viewer must believe that this new relationship is not in Alec's nature or history. (Curiously, Laura's flashback cannot have direct knowledge of this scene: are we learning of it via what Alec relays to her later?)
• Despite the obvious allusion to Anna's fate at the end of Anna Karenina (Tolstoy's narrative is famously bookended by two different deaths at a train station), Laura's husband is clearly not a blandly cruel Alexei Karenin.
Taken together, all these points make it clear that the film is taking great pains to say that Laura is no 'homewrecker' out for a bit of fun. If nothing else, it wouldn't have been possible to produce this hypothetical alternative, but it would also be completely out of step with Laura's position in society: note how the policeman doesn't really believe she is a lady of the night because of her appearance and demeanour; he's genuinely curious about her welfare. Regardless, this does nicely mirror Tolstoy's own moral philosophy in Anna Karenina, whereby "unselfish seeking of goodness obtains a state of grace, whereas a predatory self-assertion results in damnation".
Literature and philosophy aside, the way Celia Johnson looks up at Trevor Howard's Alec talking about fibrosis of the lungs and says, "You suddenly look very young" is literally haunting, in the sense that I can't stop thinking about it.
Incidentally, "The Royal", where they have champagne before Alec leaves for South Africa, is, alas, merely a set. But you can have some tea at Carnforth Station in Lancashire which stood in for the suburbs of bombed out London. It's a three or four-hour train from Kings Cross depending on your luck with the connections...
In Naples they hated it. 'All that suffering, and for what?' they cried. Even those who thought it well done also thought it appalling. They couldn't understand why Laura and Alex didn't just get on and have sex, and why indeed she didn't leave Fred for him.[…]
It is a film for women made by men. It thus affords opportunities for empowerment (for women to take the film as theirs and tendencies towards subordination (men determining women's position). It offers an outsiders view of women's live, with all the potential which that presents for sympathy and clear-sightedness as well as incomprehension and offence.
[…]
One effort of [the] redundant voiceover narration, however, is to insist that this long flashback is not just a device for telling one story in the context of another, but is specifically Laura's telling of it.
[…]
The men are all in positions of authority, either by virtue of their general social status (clergyman, doctor, policeman) or their gender position in relation to Laura. None actually expresses disapproval; rather, she internalises their views, she feels looked at, judged, found wanting.
[…]
The price of the film giving [Laura] narrative authority is the insistent reminder that the terms in which she speaks are laid down by men —not by individual men, but by masculinist discourse itself, carried in the looks, bearing and clothes of men, in what Laura has so well learnt of male values.
[…]
[Laura's] reading habit suggests the way in which she inhabits, if only in the privacy of reading, a particular set of ways of thinking and feeling, a particular discourse; many who saw the film could read Laura's situation through this discourse, make it (and especially [Celia] Johnson's performance) speak what Laura's confession cannot.
[…]
No film could be more a case of a drama unfolded to music, the literal definition of melodrama — Brief Encounter without Rachmaninov is unimaginable. Nor could any film be more about the necessity and impossibility of desire, the clash of the demands of the heart and the limitations of reality, to take contemporary theorists' definition of film melodrama.
[…]
It is common to characterise [the English] way with emotions as inhibited or even emotionless. The English are cold fish with stiff upper lips. Yet this is to mistake restraint for repression and lack of expression for lack of feeling. [On] the one hand, their [holding] back [is] not just conventionality or inhibition, but also a sense of affection and loyalty to others, a desire not to hurt anyone. Such niceness is for women indeed inextricable from the internalised address of patriarchy […]. The sense of English restraint being to do with gentleness and consideration for others may also be felt to sit ill with the actual record of British imperialism. It is an illusory ideal — but not an unattractive or contemptible one. Such restraint is not the absence of feeling. Indeed, there can be no concept of restraint without an acknowledgement of feeling – restraint must keep something emotional in check.
[…]
Brief Encounter's recourse to music and to filmic devices also suggests, in this quite extraordinarily verbal film, the limitations of everyday speech to express emotion.
— Richard Dyer: BFI Film Classics: Brief Encounter (2015)
Synopsis: Returning home from a shopping trip to a nearby town, bored suburban housewife Laura Jesson is thrown by happenstance into an acquaintance with virtuous doctor Alec Harvey. Their casual friendship soon develops during their weekly visits into something more emotionally fulfilling than either expected, and they must wrestle with the potential havoc their deepening relationship would have on their lives and the lives of those they love.