Brief Encounter [Blu-Ray]
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Director : David Lean
Screenplay : Noel Coward (based on his play Still Life)
MPAA Rating : NR
Year of Release : 1945
Stars : Celia Johnson (Laura Jesson), Trevor Howard (Dr. Alec Harvey), Stanley Holloway (Albert Godby), Joyce Carey (Myrtle Bagot), Cyril Raymond (Fred Jesson), Everley Gregg (Dolly Messiter), Margaret Barton (Beryl Walters), Marjorie Mars (Mary Norton)
Tender without being melodramatic, intense without being tawdry, David Lean’s Brief Encounter tells the story of a doomed romance between a man and woman who are married to other people but hopelessly in love with each other. Yet, they are so torn by the guilt of deceiving their spouses that they never share physical contact outside of kissing, and eventually they call off their relationship because they realize it will hurt too many people.
For some modern viewers, it will be hard not to see the restriction of physical intimacy between them as a sign of the times in which the film was made and the fact that they end their illicit affair and return to their respective spouses as a conservative, moralistic affirmation of the necessity of marital fidelity. After all, Brief Encounter was released in 1945, a time when film censor boards did not look kindly on stories that treated adultery in a sympathetic light. While this certainly had something to do with how the narrative was formed, there is much more to it.
The screenplay by Noel Coward, based on his one-act play Still Life, is about passion and pain and how those two emotions are closely linked. The couple in love, a suburban housewife named Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and a doctor named Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), give themselves over to their overwhelming feelings for each other, but never entirely. The film is told completely from Laura’s point of view; in fact, her voice-over narration actually takes the form of a confession to her husband (Cyril Raymond) that takes place in her mind the night she ends her relationship with Alec.
The sadness in her voice and her longing to explain to her husband what has happened over the past month shows in no uncertain terms that she still loves him. This is not a film that attempts to explain away or justify her affair by making her husband into an abusive lout or a miserable dullard. Instead, it takes the more complex route, suggesting that a woman can love two men in completely different ways. Nothing drives her into Alec’s arms outside of an inexplicable passion that she could neither predict nor control. “I’m an ordinary woman,” she says at one point. “I didn’t know such violent things could happen to ordinary people.”
The film takes place in England just before World War II, and it opens with a painful scene in which Laura and Alec are saying their final good-bye to each other at the train station where they first met. At this point, we have not seen any of their relationship, but the sad looks on their faces let us know exactly what is happening. At that inopportune moment, one of Laura’s gossipy, chatterbox friends comes in and, unaware of the situation, sits down with them and starts rambling on about nothing. The power and resonance of the film is immediately evident in that we can feel Laura and Alec’s longing for each other and frustration that their last moments together have been ruined by this intrusion, even though we have not been formally introduced to either character yet.
In flashback, Laura narrates the circumstances under which she and Alec met and eventually fell in love. In some ways, their romance is utterly mundane, consisting mostly of eating lunch together, going to the cinema, taking drives out in the country, stealing kisses in the dark tunnels between landing platforms while the trains rumble overhead. Many have praised this aspect of the film, noting how the everyday details coalesce into a stark realism that makes their romance that much more affecting.
The director, David Lean, who would go on to large, widescreen epics like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), shows a mastery for catching the small details. Nothing feels out of place or exaggerated, and he holds each scene for just the right amount of time. When Laura and Alec finally profess their love for each other, he doesn’t push the scene and force it into high-pitched melodrama. Lean is aided greatly by two superb performances by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, both of whom have exceptionally expressive faces. The gradual development of their affair is so natural and unforced that it is never clear exactly when it moves from friendly companionship to romance. It just happens, and when the characters realize it, we don’t doubt it for a second. At that point, the story has taken control, and the fact that we know it ends in heartbreak adds an extra layer of poignancy to everything they do.
Brief Encounter is often classified as a “woman’s picture,” a dominant genre of the ’40s and ’50s. From a narrative perspective, the film certainly identifies most strongly with the woman; the fact that we never seen Alec’s wife or homelife is indicative of how unwavering the film’s point of view is. Yet, Brief Encounter transcends such labels in the way it deals with emotions that cut across gender lines. Anyone who has ever been in a relationship that was too complicated and painful to continue will immediately identify with what happens to Laura and Alec. Their decision to call off the affair is not a simplistic paean to the overriding necessity of maintaining a marriage or a sign of weakness that they cannot handle the social stigma of adultery. Rather, it is a sad, but truthful affirmation of the complexities of life and the fact that not all romances, no matter how intensely felt or seemingly perfect, are meant to be.
| Brief Encounter Criterion Collection Blu-Ray | |
 Brief Encounter is available exclusively as part of the four-disc “David Lean Directs Noel Coward” box set (SRP $79.95), which also includes In Which We Serve (1942), This Happy Breed (1944), and Blithe Spirit (1945). The box set is also available on DVD. | |
| Aspect Ratio | 1.37:1 |
| Audio | |
| Subtitles | English |
| Supplements | In Which We Serve This Happy Breed Blithe Spirit Brief Encounter
|
| Distributor | The Criterion Collection |
| SRP | $79.95 (box set) |
| Release Date | March 27, 2012 |
| VIDEO & AUDIO | |
| The transfers for all four films in The Criterion Collection’s “David Lean Directs Noel Coward” boxset were made from elements obtained from the major restoration of Lean’s first 10 films, which was carried out between 2006 and 2008 by the BFI National Archive, Granada International, and the David Lean Foundation under the direction of the BFI’s senior curator Nigel Algar. The restoration work involved both traditional photochemical and digital processes. The 4K transfer of In Which We Serve was made from the original nitrate negative and parts of the nitrate fine-grain master, while the soundtrack was restored from a sound print made from the original negative. The high-definitional scan of both This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit were made from the restoration internegatives, which were produced from the original YCM negatives, while the soundtracks were transferred from sound prints. Brief Encounter’s 4K transfer was made from a duplicate safety negative, while the soundtrack was transferred from a sound print made from the original nitrate track negative. Simply put, the restoration work has resulted in a four stunning presentations, bringing these films as close to their original theatrical presentations as they are likely to look (Lean, ever the perfectionist craftsman, would be pleased). The black-and-white imagery in In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter is sharp and beautifully delineated, with a fine presence of grain and excellent contrast. The transfers of This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit boast first-rate representations of three-strip Technicolor, although they make for a fascinating contrast, with the purposely tamped down palette of the former looking quite different from the more traditionally saturated look of the latter. Digital restoration has removed virtually all signs of wear and tear on the films (including the removal of a great deal of mold on This Happy Breed) without overly scrubbing them and losing their filmlike appearance, and the soundtracks are all acceptably clean, with a minimum of ambient hiss and little in the way of aural pops and clicks. | |
| SUPPLEMENTS | |
| The supplements are spread fairly evenly across all four discs in the box. Each disc features a new video interview with scholar Barry Day, author and editor of numerous books on Noel Coward, including Coward on Film: The Cinema of Noel Coward (2004) and The Noel Coward Reader (2011). In each of these interviews, which tend to run around 15 minutes in length, Day discusses the specifics of the particular film with a particular focus on Coward’s role in it. On the discs for In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter there are also short retrospective documentaries about the film’s production made for British television in 2000. In Which We Serve includes a lengthy audio recording of a conversation between Richard Attenborough and Coward at London’s National Film Theatre in 1969 and the original theatrical trailer. The disc for This Happy Breed includes both the original and a later re-release trailer for the film along with a 45-minute video interview with cinematographer-screenwriter-producer Ronald Neame, which was recorded in 2010 when he was 99 years old. The Blithe Spirit disc includes the film’s trailer and an episode of the British television series The Southbank Show from 1992 on the life and career of Coward, while the Brief Encounter disc includes David Lean: A Self Portrait, a 1971 television documentary. Brief Encounter also includes a well-written and informative audio commentary by film historian Bruce Eder, which appeared on the previous Criterion DVD and was originally recorded in 1995 for the Criterion laser disc. Eder offers a large amount of detail about every aspect of the film, from Lean’s use of sound, to comparisons of the film with Noel Coward’s original play, to discussions of the historical contexts in which the film has been received. | |
Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick
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