brief encounter (w&d david lean, w. noël coward, anthony havelock-allan, ronald neame)

When the lights came up in Montevideo’s Cinemateca, there was more one person who could be seen unashamedly in tears. How can a black and white, subtitled British film made in 1945 continue to exert such an effect? The answer is twofold. On the one hand it’s simple. This is one of the classic cinematic Ur-Love Stories. The account of the doomed love affair of Dr Alec Harvey and Laura Jesson represents a transcendent vision of that thing called romantic love upon which so much of our western dreamlife is predicated. Their love is uncomplicated, unconsummated, and clear as mountain stream. It is a kind of dream we are born and bred to share and when we witness this framed within the rectangle of the cinema screen, it has a potency that real life, with all its complications, struggles to emulate. On the other, this is a result of delicious artistry. From Lean’s opening shot, as the camera initially focuses on Stanley Holloway flirting with the station cafe manageress, before panning to the protagonists, the film exudes a delicacy blended with high passion. We are spies on this couple’s intimacy. Coward’s script is a thing of joy, blending reserve with those moments when the reserve breaks and Howard declares, with an unbridled simplicity, that he loves Laura. The violence of love is laid bare, the way it creates great joy, but an equal measure of sorrow. Somehow Coward manages to squeeze in a reference to Keats, the prince of romantic poetry. This violence would, of course, have had a heightened resonance at the time of the film’s release, a moment when so many relationships would have flowered briefly only to be torn apart by war. Of course there is something that feels inimically British in the way that the characters wrestle to keep their passions under control, but at the same time the film makes one think of another great unconsummated cinematic love story, Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The yearning of love, also known as the tugging of the heartstrings, is a universal emotion. Lean and Coward’s encapsulation of these emotions, delivered in the flesh by the sublime performances of Howard and Johnson, reverberates across the decades.