Brief Encounter at Eighty: Why We Still Fall in Love with David Lean’s 1945 Romance | Drama movies

TThe first time David Lean’s 1945 romantic masterpiece was shown to the public, audiences were in shock. It wasn’t a comedy, it was far from ideal. The director felt extremely embarrassed, so he returned to his hotel, planning to break into the film factory and burn the negative as soon as possible.

Eighty years later, the legacy of Brief Encounter has proven anything but that. Firstly, the train station setting and its ubiquity on British television led to parodies by everyone from Victoria Wood to Bird’s Eye takeaways.

In 1999, it was voted No. 2 in the list of the 100 greatest British films of the century by the British Film Institute. Greta Gerwig called it “the most romantic film ever made.” Its central conflict—the attraction of doomed, unconsummated love and longing between two people who place responsibility over happiness—has become the template for some of the greatest romances ever intended for the big screen.

Getting there was not an easy journey. Set in the colorful (if not metaphorical) 1930s, the film stars Celia Johnson as Laura – completely ordinary, completely married, and painfully middle-class. After a piece of pellet falls into her eye at a train station, she is treated by a passing doctor, Alec (Trevor Howard). The pair begin a whirlwind romance – despite their better natures.

Although it is based on Noel Coward’s 1936 short pre-war play, Still Life, Brief Encounter, it was designed and filmed in the less film-friendly environment of wartime Britain. Changes made from one stage to another would change the spirit of the story. A year-long affair will become a seven-week infatuation. The story of extramarital guilt became a story of middle-class self-restraint. It was a kind of wish fulfillment for Lin, for example, as his accountant father had abandoned his family in similar circumstances 22 years earlier.

The location shooting in early 1945 was cold but happy, despite the doubts some were beginning to have about the male lead. Johnson wrote that Howard was “nice, but kind of stupid.” “He later became a great actor, but oh dear, there were a lot of things on his mind,” Lin agreed.

Carnforth railway station – now a Lancashire tourist attraction complete with replica tea room – stood in for the Home Counties setting, which was chosen to give the crew time to cover their lamps in the event of a German air raid. Filming was still in progress when the crew heard that the UK’s supply of Technicolor cameras were being diverted to Buckingham Palace – Johnson recalled running to the radio between takes to hear Winston Churchill announce Germany’s surrender.

This means that by then a brief meeting Played to an audience, it was a wartime film, set before the war, played to a post-war audience. This perhaps explains its strangely muted reception: despite critical admiration and Coward’s pedigree as a writer, it had strong but mediocre box office success in the UK. Posters in the country’s industrial areas resorted to praising it “despite the unbridled praise of London critics.”

For some, the film came to embody a kind of British identity now lost in its pre-war origins. Writing to Coward in 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten said: “There is no doubt in my mind that films of this kind should help to rebuild British prestige which has now temporarily diminished.” Months later, Mountbatten oversaw the partition of India, leaving the British Empire in tatters and up to two million dead.

For others, the film’s story now hits too close to home. The constant wartime movement around the railway network at home and abroad had sparked a number of ‘brief encounters’ all of their own – affairs without the film’s insistence on remaining unfinished. Despite the story’s pre-war context and concept, it nonetheless now conjures specters of guilt that some audiences had forgotten.

However, admiration in some circles kept the flame of Brief Encounter alive long after it left cinemas. One of 11 winners of the Grand Prix (the predecessor to the Palme d’Or) at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, he escaped that year’s Oscars with three nominations but no statuettes. The now-infamous first Sight & Sound critics’ poll in 1952 placed it higher than Citizen Kane.

Her reputation among the public grew over time. Lin recalls, by chance, waiting for a train when a man approached him, threatening to punch him. “Do you realize, sir, that if Celia Johnson is thinking about cheating on her husband, my wife could be thinking about cheating on me?” Lane recalled saying. Divorce remains a sensitive topic in the UK, and Brief Encounter’s popularity may rise as public attitudes liberalize.

Meanwhile, the film received an indirect boost in the US, where Billy Wilder felt inspired by one of Brief Encounter’s youngest characters. Valentin Dial’s uncredited role as a man whose empty apartment almost serves as a couple’s love nest would turn out to be the best of Jack Lemmon’s sad career.

“I think the interesting character is the friend who comes home and finds the bed still warm,” Wilder said. His most serious American film about forbidden love – The Apartment, set in the 1960s – moves the story from the social ladder to the corporate ladder, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture for which Brief Encounter failed to receive a nomination.

In the UK, the film’s recurring place in those new television schedules meant that by the 1970s, advertising director Alan Parker could use it to advertise Birds Eye roast beef dinners. Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto – which recurs throughout the film – regularly tops polls as the favorite piece of classical music in the UK, as it continues to do today.

Other effects are more subtle. Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day bears a striking resemblance to Coward’s monologue about middle-class oppression. Her mid-century butler has absorbed the same lessons of duty and propriety to such an extent that he may have forgotten how to feel loved at all. The reverse shot of When Harry Met Sally’s dinner scene perfectly captures Alec and Laura’s first lunch at the Kardomah Café, as does the film’s conception of a relationship built on repeated chance encounters.

It was also after Coward’s death that the film’s LGBTQ+ resonances came to the fore. His penchant for filling his texts with love affairs, love triangles, and secret crushes did not go unnoticed among the gay community in 1945.

The writer died just six years after homosexuality was first decriminalized in 1967, and the writer’s posthumous coming out of the closet confirms that the film’s study of forbidden love may have meant something more to its author than the social stigma that frightened Alec and Laura into obedience.

In the twenty-first century, Sofia Coppola cited it As an inspiration for her 2003 film Lost in Translation. “You feel so much with just a gesture or a pause,” she said. “It’s very emotional but it’s all under the surface. Maybe that’s too English? But I like it.”

The ideas of Brief Encounter prove more universal than Johnson’s glass-cut tone suggests. Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love explores themes similar to infidelity, as much about the social pressure placed on a relationship as infatuation itself.

Canadian director Celine Song explored the “What If?” Question through the Korean concept of inyeon (The romantic mystery of the feeling of connection between two strangers) in her 2023 film, Past Lives. The opening shot of a love triangle observed across a bar reflects Alec and Laura’s final moments together.

Today, Brief Encounter occupies a strange place in the lives of both Lean and Coward: a tea-room romance from a director famous for his bombastic epics, and the last great film from a writer who never thought about the medium anyway. However, of all their works, this may be the one that has lasted the longest. For 80 years, we’ve never been able to stop asking: “What if?”