Brief Encounter, A British film of enduring love.
https://www.criterion.com/films/345-brief-encounter

The BFI’s 70th anniversary reissued classic Brief Encounter.
Brief Encounter has been a firm favourite in my household for years, first on TV, then video, now DVD, but has always been seen on the small screen. So when the opportunity came up to see this 1940s classic, up close and personal, I packed my country basket, stepped onto a train and chugged my excited, marital way up to the big smoke – a fitting start I thought.

Meeting a friend, a fellow Encounter devotee, at the cinema doors we armed ourselves with coffee and croissants and settled into the red, sound absorbing seats prepared for our filmic experience. First, came a filmic short, A Kiss in the Tunnel by G A Smith. Shot in 1899 it’s a mini story of two passengers who, undercover of a tunnel, get increasingly amorous – when I say that I mean passion within the confines of Victorian morality – and steal a kiss.

Then it starts, the film proper. Big, smokey, crisp with close-ups close enough to feel the very fibres of their passion and loss. Every shot is a movie still. Noel Coward’s screenplay plus the sheer scale of Rachmaninoff’s piano score become a tumble of emotions, none of which are allowed to reach a climax thanks to the constraints of 1940s middle-class, middle England.
Punctuating Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard’s love story of two married people literally from the opposite of the railtracks, is the cheeky tale of the station master and the cafe owner – complete with saucy quips and bottom slapping.

These vignettes provide moments of light relief from the torment the two would-be lovers are experiencing. We witness the initial giddy happiness of their relationship, which they inevitably have to dissolve thanks to the confines of social and marital pressure of that time. All we can do as a contemporary audience is witness their dignified resignation and true British stiff-upper lipped-ness. To say we feel their pain is an understatement.

The film ends, tears are wiped away and we leave the cinema, wondering what would have happened if the story had been set in more recent times, which of course it has – once with Robert de Niro and Meryl Streep, and an earlier more bizarre pairing of Richard Burton and Sofia Loren. We comfort ourselves in the knowledge that had the original Laura and Alec been allowed to be together, it probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.
The timetable beckons, and I board the train again. Home back to familiarity, my child sleeping upstairs, or at least he would be if wasn’t at school; back to my husband and his kindly ways, and back to cooking on the Aga, or at least I would have been if it hadn’t been ditched in favour or a super-duper six-burner. Escapism and nostalgia are wonderful, wonderful things, most of the time.

Cast:
Celia Johnson.……………………..…………..……………………Laura Jesson
Trevor Howard..…………..….…..…………..………………………………Alec Harvey
Stanley Holloway……………………………………………..………..…..…. Albert Godby
Joyce Carey………..…………………………………..………..……..……….Myrtle Bagot
Cyril Raymond………….………………..……………………………………Fred Jesson
Everley Gregg………….………………..………………………….…………. Dolly Messiter
Margaret Barton………….………………..……………..…………. Beryl Waters Stanley
Dennis Harkin………….………………..……………………………………. Stephen Lynn
Marjorie Mars………….………………..………………………………………. Mary Norton
Credits:
Directed by…….…………………………………………………………………. David Lean
Screenplay by………..…..……………………………………..……..………. Noël Coward
Cinematography by……………………………………………………….… Robert Krasker
Edited by…………….…….……………..………..…………………………….. Jack Harris
Sound Edited by…………….…….……………..………..…………………….. Harry Miller
Art Direction by…………….…….……………..………..…….…………….. L. P. Williams