David Lean’s romance makes falling in love feel ordinary and frightening, with Celia Johnson giving Laura’s anxiety painful weight. Alec is less fully drawn, but this is still a film we would urge a stranger to see.
Brief Encounter takes an ordinary attraction seriously enough to make it painful, and we recommend it without asking anyone to make allowances for its age. David Lean, directing Noël Coward’s screenplay, follows two married people whose feelings threaten lives they have no wish to despise. The difficulty is there from the start: falling in love does not conveniently make their existing obligations worthless. The film gives us reason to want these people together without making everyone in their way objectionable.
Celia Johnson’s Laura Jesson is the reason this remains so affecting. Johnson makes Laura’s awareness of what is proper persist even when she can no longer feel as she is supposed to, so that pleasure brings its own immediate discomfort. We found her anxiety almost unbearable: being with Alec offers happiness, and Johnson lets us see how quickly Laura begins to question her right to it. She makes that guilt understandable even when we wish Laura could feel less of it.
Trevor Howard gives Dr Alec Harvey enough ordinariness to make the attraction plausible. These are people who might otherwise pass unnoticed, and the growing importance they assume for each other is the film’s most persuasive achievement. Cyril Raymond’s Fred Jesson matters just as much to its honesty. His decent, unexciting husband gives Laura no easy excuse, and Raymond makes it possible to understand why a marriage might offer security without meeting every need.
Robert Krasker’s cinematography gives Laura’s distress a physical force. An occasional tilt makes the frame itself feel wrong, a conspicuous disturbance in a film about people trying to keep their composure. We can feel the strain without needing anyone to announce it. Lean’s use of that flourish is effective because the acting remains so controlled; a more demonstrative performance would have made the same shot excessive.
Jack Harris’s editing does something equally important with our understanding of what we have seen. When scenes recur, what has changed is our knowledge of the people in them, so an exchange can become painful without acquiring a more emphatic performance. This is a precise use of repetition, trusting us to remember and reconsider. The gradual attachment has room to develop within a running time of 86 minutes.
There is a limit to that intimacy. Alec is less fully available to us than Laura, and Howard sometimes has to rely on simple decency where Johnson can suggest a complicated inner life. Coward’s concentration on her anxieties makes sense, but it leaves us with a romance in which one person is more thoroughly known. A little more uncertainty in Alec would have made their meetings richer.
For a romance, its willingness to let ordinary obligations matter is unusually demanding. Lean does not ask us to despise Fred so that we can care about Laura and Alec. It is possible to wish for their happiness and still worry about the people around them, and the film gives that worry proper weight. Give Johnson your attention, even when she seems to be doing almost nothing.
