5/5 Love the Movie Brief Encounter
  by Lynn Baker (Monson, Ma. USA)
Brief Encounter is an old movie which I enjoyed very much. It was filmed tn the Carnforth Railroad Station in the Lake District of England which was my main travel beginning and ending of each trip I took in England last month. This has made the movie special for me. I would recommend it to any older movie buffs however. It was a book originally, that was banned in Ireland. While waiting for trains in the morning and while having breakfast there in the refreshment room. Many people stopped by to see the station and take photos. A walk through the gift shop was a must, where you can also view the movie in parts as you wait for your train.

5/5 Flawless Production, Ageless Themes
  by Neil Cotiaux (North Canton, Ohio United States)
I had just finished reading Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter" when I popped in this film. Not a conscious thematic choice, just a convenience based on the relatively brief running time (less than 90 minutes) and an opening in my daily schedule.

In both literature and cinema, the themes of illicit love, the routineness of long-term relationships, the desire to live life on a grander scale, the clash between society's norms and individual choice and personal moral codes in conflict with action have been picked over almost endlessly. Turn on the afternoon "soaps" (if you dare to) and it's all there, just as it is in majestic works like this one. We know these themes. Many of us have lived out these themes. They seem encoded in our DNA. How we react to these themes in film and literature appears to center on two basic points of view: Our age, and our own life experience. And that explains the general reaction to this film among its viewers.

Many twenty-somethings, save mostly those who make a point of studying film, tend to dismiss movies like "Brief Encounter" as a cinematic and thematic relic of another place and time. At a time when Hugh Grant jumps in bed with the first girl he meets in the first ten minutes of yet another forgettable film, and when FWB ("Friends With Benefits") abounds, it's hard for the younger set to relate to Classic Romance. Further, those who have not yet fully experienced life's shades of gray will not relate to universal themes as deeply as those who have run up some miles.

And shades of gray is what "Brief Encounter" has in spades. This beautifully mounted, superbly cast and exquisitely acted production is a gem. From the hissing steam of the locomotives, to the afternoon cinema enveloped in darkness, to the rain-soaked railway station at night, this David Lean-Noel Coward collaboration traffics in ambiguity, creating an extraordinary interplay of delirious human happiness and nagging, draining moral issues.

With Lean and Coward at the throttle, "Brief Encounter" was destined to explore these themes in superior fashion. But what truly lifts this production into the stratosphere is the performance of Celia Johnson. The opening minutes of the film lead the viewer to believe that they will observe the type of "period piece" they've seen before (and for American audiences, with some fast-paced, difficult-to-comprehend British accents to boot). Then Johnson hits the screen and the dashed expectations melt away. Trevor Howard may lead the action forward, but it is Johnson who leads forward the emotions, facially and vocally. Of special note is her flashback narrative work. In the hands of lesser talent, it might even have detracted from pace and believability. (As an example, hear Jean Seberg's pedestrian voiceovers in "Bonjour Tristesse".) Johnson nails her flashback narrative time and again, providing us with wonderful vocal work as her face reacts perfectly to outer intrusions or inner vexation.

As brief encounters go, this one may be one of the briefer ones on record, but the viewer is left with no doubt that both doctor and housewife will be seared by it forever. And one also bets that, in time, both lovers - still friends and lovers in their minds - will come to believe that the opening of an apartment door at an inopportune time may have been one of the best things to ever happen to them. And that's something many of today's younger viewers may never understand.




2/5 The grandaddy of them all ... and definitely showing its age...
  by DarthRad (CA United States)
Amor Interruptus...there is something poignant about a man and a woman getting together briefly, developing a deep bond, and then, like two ships passing in the night, separating without having consummated their relationship, and never seeing one another again...

Some modern movies that have this theme? "Before Sunrise", 'Before Sunset", "Lost in Translation", "Once".

A blurb on Amazon about "Once" implied that the roots of that movie lay in this old British movie "Brief Encounter", made in the latter days of WWII, in 1945. And so I followed this trail and rented this movie.

I love all of the modern movies listed above - they are among some of my favorite movies. And I love film history, so this was a must-see for me, to see the film that may have started this theme of Amor Interruptus in the film world.

Thank goodness it was a rental. For these relationship movies to have meaning, one has to be able to connect with the characters, and unfortunately, with the age of this film, the characters of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson just don't quite connect.

Unlike the modern movies, I couldn't sense any chemistry between the two main characters in "Brief Encounter". They just seemed to be acting. Maybe the period style of acting was just so much more melodramatic and different that it's hard to believe as real, but believability is the key to these relationship movies.

There are some other differences related to the age of this movie - Dr. Harvey, played by Trevor Howard, is the clear aggressor in pushing forward with the relationship, while Laura Jesson, played by Celine Johnson seems to just be following his lead. Throughout this movie, Laura acts so anguished and torn by by her morale values that she barely seems to enjoy the company of her friend. This was, I suppose the way men and women of that era were supposed to behave when contemplating adultery, to act anguished and conflicted; in films of that era, adultery was not supposed to be portrayed as something enjoyable and rewarding and uninhibited.

And the movie does start by flashing this full-screen Certificate of Approval from the British Board of Film Censors (probably more a requirement of WWII than anything else).

The motivations of Dr. Harvey and Laura are never fleshed out. By not portraying a strong physical chemistry on screen between the two, there is little in the plot of the story to explain why the two got together. Dr. Harvey's wife never appears and nothing bad is ever said of her. Laura's husband is portrayed as a somewhat clueless and boring, but otherwise gentle and kind and supportive man - he would have fit right in with the Kevin Costner-type 90's male of film history - so what was wrong with him as a husband? Laura on the other hand displays a ready facility for making up lies to her husband that is truly disconcerting and clashes with her other internal moralizing. I found her character to be a dissonant patchwork created by committee, and not terribly realistic. The good doctor's motivations are also difficult to understand - yes, he seems bored and ready for new adventures and is probably having a mid-life crisis, but, realistically, in his profession, surrounded by entire cadres of female nurses and secretaries, he could have had his pick of new conquests. Why pick this married woman? In the end, were these two people just bored with their dull, happy lives, and artificially thrown together ?

Brief encounters of this sort do occur in real life, and no doubt audiences of that era understood the characters better, for this was a popular and acclaimed film in its time. We live now in an Age of Information, indeed we are inundated with Too Much Information, and it is much easier to see the hypocrisies and moral dilemmas in what is going on all around us; we have thus come to expect the motivations of our movie characters to be transparent. This was certainly not the case during the time of WWII - how else could FDR and Churchill pretend that they were fighting for the freedom of Europe, use up thousands of lives of the brave men of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the other countries of Eastern Europe in their fighting forces, and then betray all of Eastern Europe to Stalin, who ended up killing more people than Hitler?

The ending of the relationship of Laura and Dr. Harvey, where they are interrupted by a loud and chatty woman and never get to say the deeply meaningful and proper good-bye that they clearly want to say to each other, is echoed in the interrupted good-bye scene in "Lost in Translation", where the same thing happened to the characters of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, except that Sophia Coppola did the final, mysterious ending in her movie so much better.

In "Brief Encounter", everything is neatly tied up and returns to A-OK normal at the end, as Laura's husband tells her, somewhat cryptically, "Thank you for coming back to me". While fulfilling the needs of the Morality Police in the film industry of that time, this ending just adds further to the dissonant quality of the movie.

This is one for the film history books.

4/5 Stiff upper lips tremble with repressed emotion
  by Alan A. Elsner (Washington DC)
This classic weepie still holds up pretty well and takes us back to a bygone age where people did not feel the need to flaunt themselves and their emotions in public.
Celia Johnson holds this romance together. She's the ordinary mother of two with the stolid, dependable, crossword solving hubby who suddenly falls in love with an equally married doctor she meets in a railway station. The two meet several more times, proclaim their love for one another, almost consummate it -- and then step back and do the decent thing by returning to their spouses.
Johnson has to narrate the movie as well as act in it and gives a performance of remarkable restraint and power. Trevor Howard, the doctor, is a bit over the top, declaring in that thrilling British voice, "I love you, I love you" again and again.
It's amusing the note how British accents have changed in the past 60 years. Nobody speaks in that clipped, hoity-toity way any more. Also amusing to see everyone incessantly puffing away at their cigarettes in almost every scene.
Also we get a glimpse of the British class system circa 1945. The lower orders, played by Joyce Cary and Stanley Holloway, are there only for comic relief a la Shakespeare. But Cary delivers a nice performance of a cockney trying to put on an upper class accent.
At the end of the day, this movie stands and falls on the relationship of the leading players and the story. It's interesting that Noel Coward, who wrote it, approaches the story entirely from the woman's perspective. We hear all of Johnson's inner thoughts -- and none of Howard's. For the most part, it still works pretty well.
The period atmosphere of poor, postwar England with its cups of tea and its dingy efforts at respectability add interest.

2/5 2 stars out of 4
  by One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:

A romantic movie whose romance is so understated it's almost not even there (even the movie's stars didn't get why their characters *mild spoiler* don't have sex), Brief Encounter may appeal to minimalists but it sure would be a lot more interesting if something actually happened; aside from the inspired black and white photography there's little to recommend about this slow and dated romance.