 Starring: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey
Director: David Lean
Year Of Release: 1945
Plot: Housewife Laura Jesson and Dr. Alex Harvey meet randomly in a train station cafe. They continue to meet each Thursday and gradually fall in love, despite both being married and knowing they are never going to leave their partners of consummate their union. Narrated by Laura, the film takes you inside her head and into her thoughts on the romance and the feelings behind the duo’s encounters. |
Brief Encounter is a glorious movie. Despite its reputation for being ridiculously English and repressed, with everyone talking in clipped tones, it’s actually far more daring than people give it credit for. It is, after all, a mid-1940s movie about to people having an affair, and while they never make love, they are unfaithful in virtually every other respect. Indeed, the film was banned in Ireland for showing an adulterer in a positive light.
It’s also a very unusual movie. There are few films that I can think of that take you so completely inside somebody’s head, and present a picture of how people think that is so recognisable and honest. It’s one of the reasons the film has remained a classic, because it’s not just about romance and lost love, but a rare look into the drama of people’s thoughts, which aren’t necessarily apparent to the rest of the world. Inside Laura’s head she runs away into fantasy one minute before descending into worry and guilt the next. Remarkably little actually happens in the film, other than two people going to the cinema or meeting in a train station. The entire thing is brought to life by Laura’s narration of her own thoughts, helped immensely by a superlative performance from Celia Johnson.
There’s one moment I particularly love, not because it’s important, but because it shows a rare acknowledgment of the brief thoughts and flashes of emotion that come unbidden into the mind whether you want them to or not. It’s near the beginning before we go into flashback, and Laura is sitting on a train having just seen Alec for the last time. Opposite her an acquaintance is babbling away, and then the narration kicks in and it’s wonderful. Laura talks about how she wishes she could tell the women about her thoughts and feelings over the end of her affair, how she desperately wishes she was a close, trusted friend who wouldn’t judge or repeat what she says, rather than a gossip she barely knows. You can sense the emotions overwhelming Laura and her desire to let them out -but she can’t - and to the outside world she just looks a little peaky.
Then she suddenly thinks about the chatty women, ‘I wish you were dead’, before immediately taking it back because it’s mean. It’s an odd moment, but truly wonderful because it gets at a truth that’s rarely explored in film, about how random the mind can be, and how thoughts and feelings can swirl around that we seem to have little control over and which need to be reined in. It’s a brief flash of emotion the world will never know about, but it seems true and honest, and is something that rarely gets acknowledged in film.
In fact, Brief Encounter is all about how the mind is far more important to an individual than their actions. As mentioned, Alec and Laura don’t actually physically make love, their affair is all mental. While it would have been difficult to make a film with two married people having sex in the mid-40s, the film is all the more powerful for ensuring they never consummate their desire even with a kiss. Instead it becomes a moving exploration of the emotional side of romance, with two people feeling connected and sharing with each other on a mental rather than physical level. They each give the other what they feel they’re lacking elsewhere. Laura’s husband is a nice chap and provides the money, but he doesn’t seem to pay much attention to his wife and so it is mental nourishment that Laura feels deprived of and which Alec offers her. He makes her feel as is if someone cares about her as an individual with a mind of her own and not just because she physically cooks the dinner and looks after the children.
These internal, mental things are rarely handled well in film, and the reason is partly because of the mantra that is drummed into filmmakers and screenwriters – show, don’t tell. As film is a visual medium, you need to show people what’s going on through action rather than just having characters telling you about it via dialogue. To be honest ‘show, don’t tell’ isn’t a bad idea most of the time, but having that idea so drummed into people, does mean that the mental, interior lives of people often gets pushed to one side, because it’s very difficult to show it visually.
In most films characters are shown kissing and having some sort of physical intimacy, because it visually displays what’s going on, rather than just having people telling each other how much they like one another. Brief Encounter gets over this problem by being rather clever with the visuals. While Laura is basically telling us rather than showing us, director David Lean uses lighting and framing to contrast what Laura says with her actions. When we hear her narration, the briefest flickers of what she’s talking about flash across her face, and the background darkens as we realise she’s now in her own mental world and virtually oblivious to what’s going on around her. Lean gets over the ‘show, don’t tell’ problem by creating ‘action’ and drama out of the difference between an individual’s secret thoughts and how they look to the world around them.
This sort of deep delving into someone’s individual mental world doesn’t happen very much in films, because it can be tricky to pull off and having a character constantly narrating their thoughts doesn’t sound very visual until you see what a director like David Lean does with it.
In many ways it’s a real shame there are so few movies like Brief Encounter, which go beyond the surface into the rich interior world of the mind. It’s a world everyone has, but we only ever get to experience our own, and if often so different to what we present to the outside world. It’s also often where far more drama gets played out than in real life. Another of Brief Encounter’s wonderful facets is that most of the tension comes not from what has actually happened, but from Laura’s worries over what might or could happen, about whether the way she thinks about things is the same as other people would, and also whether what she’s thinking is correct or if she’s just deluding herself. Again, it’s immensely honest, as in real life people do tend to mentally tie themselves in knots even if their actions don’t betray it, but it’s difficult to show it visually on-screen and so it tends to get ignored.
It seems to me the interior of the individual human mind is a rich area for movies to explore, but it tends to scare filmmakers off because it doesn’t seem that cinematic if you can’t show it through their actions. However Brief Encounter shows that it can be, and wonderfully so.
TIM ISAAC
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