Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 2-April-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Brief Encounter (1945)

The average adultery movie focuses on how hot illicit sex can be and how much one has to pay to get it. The whole kit and canoodle — the temptation, the danger, the pleasure, the price — is offered up as a titillating antithesis to the viewers' own experience, which is presumed (probably rightly) to be boring. The Noel Coward-David Lean collaboration "Brief Encounter" casts adultery in a different light and achieves a certain dignity because of it. This film presents married people falling in love as an example of the bittersweet facts of life that sometimes try the least glamorous, most well-meaning of souls.

"Brief Encounter" is told in flashbacks from the memory of Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), a plain and proper English housewife who enlivens her domestic routine by taking the train into town every Thursday. On one of her excursions she strikes up a seemingly trivial acquaintance with Alec Harvey (the superfantastic Trevor Howard), a doctor who also commutes to town once a week to work at the hospital. The third time their paths cross they end up sitting together in a crowded restaurant and spending the afternoon at the movies. Their friendship is innocent at first: they describe their spouses, speak unironically of their modest lives, and giggle at the comic people around them (including a pair of tearoom romancers played by Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carey). It isn't until Alec lights up at the attention Laura pays his life's ambition that they realize they might be in trouble.

For several more Thursdays these two sensible, decent grown-ups make plans to meet even though they know that they've stumbled into love and love between them is impossible. Every minute they spend together mingles deep yearning with daunting guilt, so there's no release from pain. The situation is romantic and sexy to a point (all those trains and steam), but more than anything it's sad. The impulse is to pity Laura and Alec rather than envy their daring abandon, and it's easy to give in to this impulse. (The movie's viewers have it easier than its characters.) For one, the actors depict the lovers' predicament as neither overly melodramatic nor insufficiently passionate; they express a natural meeting of hearts and minds. In addition, Coward's script provides an important look at Laura's home life and relationship with her husband (Cyril Raymond), from which one can extrapolate Alec's circumstances as well. The Jessons' marriage is run-of-the-mill, to be sure, but it suits them both in its comfortable simplicity. Laura doesn't want to escape to Alec's arms, she just wants to be in them. Such a matter-of-fact interpretation of the effects of human chemistry makes "Brief Encounter" a mature and moving affair.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.