Review of Brief Encounter by David Lean

I first learned about this film from the Victoria and Albert Museum website. I don't remember when I saw the film exactly, but it said that Lean's Brief Encounter was a favorite of British moviegoers and that they play it every year with good attendance. I really like David Lean. I've seen his big hits; Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and Passage to India. Yet, I've also seen some of his early works; Great Expectations and Brief Encounter. I really enjoyed Great Expectations. A lot of great camera work, shots, editing which Lean was so well known for.

Brief Encounter was a play based on a Noel Coward stage play. It was a one act play called Still Life. Lean and Coward expanded it into a full length screenplay which became the movie. It is not a long film. It only runs about an hour and a half. The film is in black and white. The shots are straight forward. There is, true to Lean's style, a great editing montage sequence where the woman looks out a train window at her and her lover dancing in a ballroom, at the Opera, and in a horse carriage. The dream sequence takes place in the window and the woman's face is reflected against the window the entire time the dream sequence is playing. It is a great montage of how film editing used to be done; with overlapping streams and imprints on top of other scenes. It is the most technically sophisticated part of the film.

The other great parts of the film are the dialogue and the rising tension between the two lead actors. What starts out as an innocent meeting turns into something more. Over the course of the film the tension rises until they finally confess to each other that they are deeply in love. Then, later on they kiss. Yet, they break it off. They don't commit total adultery.

I suppose that's the reason why this film is still popular in Britain today. From what I know, which isn't much, Britain is country that values restraint, perhaps, even to the point of repression. Perhaps a counterpoint to Brief Encounter is Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel, made into a film several times. It was so scandalous that the book wasn't allowed to be published and the film could only be made after several decades had past. They are opposite. Brief Encounter is a film which the couple don't consummate their affair. They practice restraint and maintain their marriage vows keeping their passion for one another repressed inside of them. In Chatterley, the restraints are violated. Lady Chatterley commits adultery, with not only another man, but the a person of lower class standing, a big no-no in extremely class conscious Britain.

I enjoyed Brief Encounter. It reminded at times of Casablanca. The two protagonist close together, their faces filling up the screen, each word slowly coming out, revealing more emotion, creating more tension. A short, heartbreaking romance.