Irrevocably putting UK maestro David Lean on the international map of a rising future cinematic titan, continuing his auspicious collaborations with famed playwright Noël Coward, BRIEF ENCOUNTER has surmounted itself at the apogee of film romanticism ever since.
Based on Coward's one-act play, it is a garden-variaty extramarital affair between Laura Jesson (Johnson), a middle-class housewife and Alec Harvey (Howard), a married doctor. The film starts in the refreshment tea room of Milford Junction Station, a recurring place where they part ways after their weekly assignations, which also bookends from their first chance meeting to the ultimate farewell, but Lean cunningly leaves them in the periphery of his frame in the opening introduction, the initial perspective is of a gabby interloper Ms. Dolly Messiter (Gregg), an acquaintance of Laura, with whom she shares the same train route. Ms. Messiter's intrusion noticeably throws the pair for a loop, but Alec manages to retain his courtesy until his train arrives, and leaves Laura in an almost catatonic state, even the obtuse Ms. Messiter can tell there is something amiss about her, only if she would know, she has inconveniently obtruded herself into their last goodbye.
After returning to her suburban residence, the voiceover of a distraught Laura begins to enunciate their weekly encounters from stem to stern, at once mundanely amicable and irresistibly intimate. Hence, the story is exclusively told from Laura's viewpoint, and Celia Johnson's extraordinary performance is nonpareil in its acute caliber and immense empathy, it sweeps all over you like a cataract ever since the very first gaze she projects in a close-up, which is so galvanizing that we are rapt in anticipation of its seething undertow's unfolding, and she pampers us with the full treatment, playing out against a cordial and debonair Trevor Howard, who has his own challenge to live up to Johnson's standard in less ample allotment in terms of screen time and backstory, and leaves a sterling impression as an idealist, upstanding, charming man, makes for an emphatically conflicted dyad with Johnson enmeshed in the moral quagmire, and together they elevate the material onto a situationist slant that entirely shucking off their personal liabilities from homily: it can happen to anyone, and when it happens, no one can afford an easy escape, more pertinently, in Laura's imaginative vignettes, Lean's film rams home that this luxury of living one's dreamed life is an everyday illusion that individuality is practically irrelevant, an inevitable temptation those who encounter must cope with wisely, touch wood!
Plumping for Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto as the film's thematic signifier, Mr. Lean also constructs every shot with fluid nicety and supreme lighting in sharpening the focus on its romantic mythos and the characters' torrid inscape, and cleanses any blemish of vulgarity from the seemingly indiscreet situation, this is a film very close to perfection by this reviewer's lights, and hopefully yours too.
Based on Coward's one-act play, it is a garden-variaty extramarital affair between Laura Jesson (Johnson), a middle-class housewife and Alec Harvey (Howard), a married doctor. The film starts in the refreshment tea room of Milford Junction Station, a recurring place where they part ways after their weekly assignations, which also bookends from their first chance meeting to the ultimate farewell, but Lean cunningly leaves them in the periphery of his frame in the opening introduction, the initial perspective is of a gabby interloper Ms. Dolly Messiter (Gregg), an acquaintance of Laura, with whom she shares the same train route. Ms. Messiter's intrusion noticeably throws the pair for a loop, but Alec manages to retain his courtesy until his train arrives, and leaves Laura in an almost catatonic state, even the obtuse Ms. Messiter can tell there is something amiss about her, only if she would know, she has inconveniently obtruded herself into their last goodbye.
After returning to her suburban residence, the voiceover of a distraught Laura begins to enunciate their weekly encounters from stem to stern, at once mundanely amicable and irresistibly intimate. Hence, the story is exclusively told from Laura's viewpoint, and Celia Johnson's extraordinary performance is nonpareil in its acute caliber and immense empathy, it sweeps all over you like a cataract ever since the very first gaze she projects in a close-up, which is so galvanizing that we are rapt in anticipation of its seething undertow's unfolding, and she pampers us with the full treatment, playing out against a cordial and debonair Trevor Howard, who has his own challenge to live up to Johnson's standard in less ample allotment in terms of screen time and backstory, and leaves a sterling impression as an idealist, upstanding, charming man, makes for an emphatically conflicted dyad with Johnson enmeshed in the moral quagmire, and together they elevate the material onto a situationist slant that entirely shucking off their personal liabilities from homily: it can happen to anyone, and when it happens, no one can afford an easy escape, more pertinently, in Laura's imaginative vignettes, Lean's film rams home that this luxury of living one's dreamed life is an everyday illusion that individuality is practically irrelevant, an inevitable temptation those who encounter must cope with wisely, touch wood!
Plumping for Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto as the film's thematic signifier, Mr. Lean also constructs every shot with fluid nicety and supreme lighting in sharpening the focus on its romantic mythos and the characters' torrid inscape, and cleanses any blemish of vulgarity from the seemingly indiscreet situation, this is a film very close to perfection by this reviewer's lights, and hopefully yours too.