{"id":17949,"date":"2016-04-26T12:34:23","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T16:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=17949"},"modified":"2016-04-26T12:34:23","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T16:34:23","slug":"david-lean-brief-encounter-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2016\/04\/26\/david-lean-brief-encounter-2\/","title":{"rendered":"David Lean: Brief Encounter<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Brief Encounter<\/span>\r\n<\/em><\/strong>d.\u00a0David\u00a0Lean (1945)<\/span>\r\nSpine: #76<\/span>\r\nBlu-ray Release Date: March 27, 2012<\/span>\r\n\r\nScreen captures below are taken from The Criterion Collection Blu-ray disc.<\/span><\/pre>\n
I reviewed Brief Encounter<\/em> in November 2015 as part of the Criterion Blogathon, hosted by Criterion Blues, Speakeasy, and Silver Screenings.\u00a0At that time, the film was available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection only as part of a larger boxset called David Lean Directs No\u00ebl Coward. Today, though, Criterion has released the film in a standalone edition, and, for my money, if they’re doing this with films that deserve their own spot on the shelf, then Brief Encounter<\/em> is definitely deserving. I got a copy of the new standalone release and wanted to repost my old review along with a look at the supplemental features.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019ve\u00a0devoted so much attention\u00a0to the work of Alice Munro because\u00a0I\u00a0always tremble deeply when I encounter her depictions of\u00a0the\u00a0emotional turbulence going on under the surface of lives that appear rather unremarkable to the naked eye. People are in pain or in rapture as they clean their homes in silence on a Tuesday morning. In her masterpiece Lives of Girls and Women<\/em>, Munro writes, \u201cPeople\u2019s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable \u2014 deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.\u201d Another work of art that engages with the emotional depths of us all is\u00a0one of my favorite films, David Lean\u2019s\u00a0Brief Encounter<\/em>, an adaptation of No\u00ebl Coward\u2019s play Still Life<\/em>. In the film,\u00a0the female protagonist says this:<\/p>\n
I\u2019m an ordinary woman. I didn\u2019t think such violent things could happen to an ordinary woman.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This\u00a0“violent thing”\u00a0happens to this protagonist while\u00a0she\u00a0quietly has tea in\u00a0the corner of a small\u00a0railway station. No one pays any attention. Of course, we\u2019re talking about emotional, maybe even spiritual, violence and not physical violence. We\u2019re sensing wounds we cannot see. Why, we may not even\u00a0register that what we\u2019re sensing is a wound; we\u2019ll just see a person who slouches a bit more, sighs a bit more frequently. We may excuse it as the simple effects of time.<\/p>\n
\"Brief<\/p>\n
When\u00a0Brief Encounter<\/em>\u00a0opens, we are ushered into the railway station. We join a few characters busy serving customers, chatting lightly. In the background a couple sits having tea. They look like any nameless couple you might see when you go out. In the context of a film, they look like some extras placed\u00a0to populate the set.\u00a0But, as I mentioned above, that ho-hum scene in the background, that couple doing something as innocuous as having tea, is the emotional crux of the entire film. Soon the camera focuses on them, and we learn their story\u00a0through a series of scenes accompanied by the woman\u2019s\u00a0voiceover.<\/p>\n
Even the voiceover underlines the agony someone can experience quietly:\u00a0it\u2019s presented as a confession,\u00a0but she never\u00a0utters this\u00a0out loud. Rather, the woman is thinking it all as she sits in a chair across from her husband.\u00a0Thinking her confession: another brilliant\u00a0way to show how much tumult can be going on in the quiet, proper, even kind living room as the daylight settles into darkness.<\/p>\n
The confession, as we might guess, concerns a guilty idyll, the brief encounter of the title. The woman\u2019s name is Laura (Celia Johnson). She is in a happy marriage when she one day\u00a0chances\u00a0to meet\u00a0the kind Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) at the Milford\u00a0railway platform. She goes to Milford every Thursday to shop and catch a picture show. He comes to town every week to help out at a local hospital. Finding themselves in the same general schedule, waiting at the Milford train station each week, sensing each other long before they speak to each other, they eventually strike up a cordial friendship. He himself is a married man, and it appears that neither of them knew that they were capable of falling in love with someone else. They forgot how deeply they could be shaken. So their guard is down, and when love does spring on them it\u2019s as frightening as it is exhilarating.<\/p>\n
Though the story of a doomed\u00a0affair is far from unique,\u00a0Brief Encounter<\/em> itself is not conventional.<\/p>\n
First, the film isn\u2019t criticizing social mores that keep two people\u00a0apart, though their lives without each other are terrible. On the contrary, Laura is happily married to a good man, even if\u00a0their marriage has become a bit routine and maybe even boring as the days drift by. The affair with Alec, then, is not\u00a0some welcome intervention\u00a0into a\u00a0bad marriage.\u00a0Laura\u2019s husband is kind. In fact, he gets the film\u2019s\u00a0last line, which is as genuinely romantic and touching as anything said before by any character. With that line, he suggests his own silent pain,\u00a0though up to now we\u2019ve mostly seen him sitting quietly, as if unaware, on the other side of the living room. Magnificent.<\/p>\n
Next, the film famously never lets the lovers consummate their relationship. The climax is an anti-climax.\u00a0The punishment Laura and Alec experience is to\u00a0walk away unreleased. Again, the agony is emotional, spiritual. Physicality is a corollary that remains static.<\/p>\n
Which takes me to my final thought for now. Laura at one point says this:<\/p>\n
Nothing lasts, really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is true, but the film also shows how\u00a0the\u00a0statement\u00a0is false. Paradoxically, by cutting the relationship short, the relationship, the brief encounter, lives on, albeit in a different, emotional sphere, separate from the physical world.\u00a0Laura and Alec are\u00a0similar to\u00a0the couple\u00a0in John Keats\u2019 poem \u201cOde on a Grecian Urn.\u201d\u00a0One of the drawings on the\u00a0old urn features a\u00a0man and woman almost to embrace but forever separated by the urn’s open space.<\/p>\n
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,<\/span>
\n Though winning near the goal \u2014 yet, do not grieve;<\/span>
\n She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,<\/span>
\n For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Laura and Alec experienced an idyll that was never fulfilled \u2014 most idylls are cut short, sadly \u2014 which\u00a0may be exactly what makes\u00a0the idyll so powerful and meaningful and lasting, for better or for worse. Though it moves into the past, it stays in our minds, tantalizing us even on the dullest days. Back to Keats:<\/p>\n
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard<\/span>
\nAre sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Laura will have to live with the silent melodies of the unlived life with Alec for a long time; as her lived life with her husband\u00a0has its ups and downs, its moments of departure and return, her relationship with Alec, never consummated, never worn, will remain sweet and terrible. In the meantime, her relationship with her husband promises its own ups and downs.<\/p>\n
We are vast wells of emotion and paradox. This relationship, encased in art, reminds us of that, even as we sit and watch the film quietly in our living room.<\/p>\n
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The Criterion Collection edition<\/strong>: For people who already have the Lean\/Coward boxset, there is no need to pick up this standalone release of Brief Encounter<\/em>. It has the same transfer and the same supplements. For people who do not have that boxset, this is an easy recommendation. It is one of my favorite film, after all, and this edition is gorgeous (though I’d still recommend just getting the boxset).<\/p>\n