Brief Encounter (1945)
Country: GB
Technical: bw 86m
Director: David Lean
Cast: Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey
Synopsis:
A married woman slides irresistibly into a romantic attachment to a doctor she meets on her weekly shopping expeditions, and is made wretched by it.
Review:
The most rarefied thing in British cinema, a sentimental diary of meetings and separations conducted amid the bustle of a thirties railway station and market town. It is the woman's perspective that is privileged, the appeal of an excitement she never thought to know again, then the squeamishness and the guilt, and finally the helplessness of abandonment. Johnson is superb in the role, her features all beauty past its prime, and showing every flicker of emotion in a character who is all heart waiting to be broken. Howard, too, has rarely been better, while in Holloway and Carey's flirtatious railway employees Coward cleverly maps love's less intense, and less complex, trajectory. Lean directs what was originally a one-act play with an unerring eye for the right angle and a telling lighting effect, and the radio itself has its role to play, in flooding the soundtrack with Rachmaninoff as Johnson drifts in and out of consciousness. People now will laugh at these oft-parodied, RADA accented performances, but, as with Grand Opera in Italian, it is the truth of the emotions that Coward addresses to us that will forever win out.
Country: GB
Technical: bw 86m
Director: David Lean
Cast: Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey
Synopsis:
A married woman slides irresistibly into a romantic attachment to a doctor she meets on her weekly shopping expeditions, and is made wretched by it.
Review:
The most rarefied thing in British cinema, a sentimental diary of meetings and separations conducted amid the bustle of a thirties railway station and market town. It is the woman's perspective that is privileged, the appeal of an excitement she never thought to know again, then the squeamishness and the guilt, and finally the helplessness of abandonment. Johnson is superb in the role, her features all beauty past its prime, and showing every flicker of emotion in a character who is all heart waiting to be broken. Howard, too, has rarely been better, while in Holloway and Carey's flirtatious railway employees Coward cleverly maps love's less intense, and less complex, trajectory. Lean directs what was originally a one-act play with an unerring eye for the right angle and a telling lighting effect, and the radio itself has its role to play, in flooding the soundtrack with Rachmaninoff as Johnson drifts in and out of consciousness. People now will laugh at these oft-parodied, RADA accented performances, but, as with Grand Opera in Italian, it is the truth of the emotions that Coward addresses to us that will forever win out.
Country: GB
Technical: bw 86m
Director: David Lean
Cast: Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey
Synopsis:
A married woman slides irresistibly into a romantic attachment to a doctor she meets on her weekly shopping expeditions, and is made wretched by it.
Review:
The most rarefied thing in British cinema, a sentimental diary of meetings and separations conducted amid the bustle of a thirties railway station and market town. It is the woman's perspective that is privileged, the appeal of an excitement she never thought to know again, then the squeamishness and the guilt, and finally the helplessness of abandonment. Johnson is superb in the role, her features all beauty past its prime, and showing every flicker of emotion in a character who is all heart waiting to be broken. Howard, too, has rarely been better, while in Holloway and Carey's flirtatious railway employees Coward cleverly maps love's less intense, and less complex, trajectory. Lean directs what was originally a one-act play with an unerring eye for the right angle and a telling lighting effect, and the radio itself has its role to play, in flooding the soundtrack with Rachmaninoff as Johnson drifts in and out of consciousness. People now will laugh at these oft-parodied, RADA accented performances, but, as with Grand Opera in Italian, it is the truth of the emotions that Coward addresses to us that will forever win out.