Brief Encounter

Brief Encounter is the great film about the love affair that almost happens, and it remains, eighty years on, more devastating than a thousand films about the ones that do.

David Lean’s 1945 masterpiece, written by Noël Coward, gives us Laura (Celia Johnson), a respectable married woman, and Alec (Trevor Howard), a married doctor, who meet by chance in a railway station tearoom when he removes a bit of grit from her eye. Over a few Thursdays they fall, quietly and completely, into a love that decency and circumstance will not allow them to act on. Almost nothing happens. It is unbearable.

The film is narrated by Laura in flashback, confessing the whole thing in her head to the husband who sits across from her doing the crossword, oblivious. That framing is the masterstroke: we watch a passion of overwhelming force playing out behind the face of a woman pouring tea, and Johnson’s performance — all restraint, all the feeling pressed down beneath an English composure that is itself a kind of tragedy — is one of the finest ever filmed.

Lean shoots the railway station as a place of constant departure, steam and whistles and the clock always pushing them toward the next train home. Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto swells beneath them, lush and enormous, voicing everything the characters are too proper to say aloud. The contrast between the operatic score and the buttoned-up behavior is where the film breaks your heart.

What makes it timeless is its moral seriousness. The film is not interested in whether they should sleep together; it is interested in the cost of feeling something this large in a life with no room for it. Their restraint is not coldness — it is a wound they choose, again and again, out of duty to people who will never know what it cost them.

It is a film about goodbye, and about the ordinary heroism of going home. Watch it when you are willing to be moved by what people do not do. The final scene, in that tearoom, with a chattering acquaintance filling the silence where a farewell should be, is as quietly shattering as cinema gets.

A film this quietly devastating deserves a proper edition. The Criterion release is on Blu-ray.