Everyone who’s seen this summer’s underwhelmingly received Scott Pilgrim seems to have been blessed with divine insight as to what it would make a killer double feature with. Keith and Karla from the Starz Film Center here in Denver suggested a mind-melting combo with Speed Racer. Ain’t It Cool News’ Harry Knowles suggested a rock-tastic team-up with Phantom of the Paradise. I’ll add my own suggestion: a “cheating” double feature of Scott Pilgrim and David Lean’s 1942 love-trouble masterpiece Brief Encounter. Both feature cheating partners. Both encourage the audience to side with the wronged party, and against the protagonist. Both end by reasserting the nobility and grace of the wronged party and the foolishness of the protagonist. Just replace Scott Pilgrim’s obliviousness with Laura Jesson’s morbid, melodramatic guilt and you have a dead ringer!
In the “Watch THIS Instantly” column, I’ve written about two out of three of what are in my mind the essential WWII era British filmmakers, covering Hitchcock with Foreign Correspondent and Powell and Pressburger with 49th Parallel. Well I think it’s about time to complete the trifecta. Ladies and gentlemen, David Lean, and his blustery middleclass melodrama, Brief Encounter.
Long before he traipsed through the desert and jungle with Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai, even before he produced his classic pair of Dickens adaptations with Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, David Lean cut his teeth in the editing suite. It was directly after chopping up and assembling a pair of movies for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (One of Our Aircraft is Missing and the aforementioned 49th Parallel) that Lean took his first sit in the director’s chair. I’d like to think that his proximity to these other geniuses helped set the high bar Lean would strive to surmount throughout his entire career. Brief Encounter is not Lean’s first as director, but it was close, and by all accounts it’s the first of the kind of substance, care, and intrigue he would soon come to be known for.
Brief Encounter is not as visually showy as other Lean movies from the forties and fifties. This places the burden on his actors. Specifically, Celia Johnson as protagonist Laura Jesson spends much of the movie with the camera lingering on her face for minutes at a time, dissecting every little tick and twitch of her silent reactions. Johnson more than rises to the occasion, making these long, quiet passages more breathtaking than boring. Her portrayal of Laura Jesson belongs in the pantheon of great Lean directed roles along with Alec Guiness’ Fagin and Peter O’Toole’s T. E. Lawrence.
We are introduced to Laura at a train station, where she sits with one Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), an ‘acquaintance.’ When one of Laura’s old friends interrupts, Dr. Harvey politely excuses himself. As the door closes behind him, we see the pain written on Laura’s face - this was not meant to be a casual farewell. During her miserable train ride home, Laura narrates her troubles to the audience through voice over. Frame stories are one of the archetypical clichés of film. Before actually slipping into the meat of his tale, Lean toys around with this conceit. He teases the audience’s expectation that the narration will slip into flashback, but doesn’t allow it to happen until the last possible moment. This is the only movie I can think of that evokes actual tension over when the principle story will begin. Once the telling of the tale finally does begin, the flashback structure is formed so fluidly, so cleverly, and so originally it stands as one of the finest, most deft examples of the technique.
Racked with guilt over her recently concluded affair, Laura sits in her den, silently confessing her sins and trespasses to her husband (Cyril Raymond), who, unawares, completes the newspaper crossword puzzle. Unlike lazier uses of the frame story, there is real emotional impact in Laura unburdening herself silently (to us, the audience) in a way she would never have the guts to out loud. The den radio broadcasts a sweeping, melodramatic Rachmaninov symphony. Laura descends into the lurid details of her short-lived affair with Dr. Harvey, a stranger she meets at the train station after completing her Thursday errands. Naturally, cleverly, as Laura listens to Rockmaninov in her living room, so we hear it as the soundtrack to her narrative. At times, as emotion overwhelms the viewer, Lean cold-heartedly reminds us that this affecting music is being mundanely piped in over the radio. He takes the wind out of this affair’s sails just as masterfully and convincingly as he puts the wind in it.
Though it is often muted, this is not “a stage play on film.” Brief Encounter is technically marvelous. Even at this early stage in his career, Lean obviously understands exactly how to tell a story using deft combinations of words and pictures, creating synthesized meaning through the combination of speech and image rather than allowing one to work as mere reiteration of the other. Laura narrates her dread while putting on a happy face for her husband. A movie theater date is full of the noise and bravado of the cinema, but we notice Laura and Dr. Harvey’s quieter sidelong glances, revealing that the two are becoming more attached than either will admit.
Lean invites the viewer to slippery, fickle allegiance. Laura’s life and husband are presented as exceedingly dull compared to this passionate new romance. However, as soon as we become wrapped up in the affair, Lean reminds us that Laura’s husband Fred is really not a bad guy at all. His love for her is consistent albeit less rapturous. Fred might not be the looker that Dr. Harvey is, but he’s genuinely funny and attentive to Laura’s needs. As in life, the affair in Brief Encounter is no simple affair. Lean supplies incongruencies, not answers.
As Laura’s narrative comes to an end, it ‘doubles back’ on the first scene in the movie, as Laura and Dr. Harvey are tactlessly interrupted by Laura’s nosy friend. Many shots are the same, now imbued with new meaning from the knowledge we’ve gained. Many are different, new angles on the scene, illuminating previously unseen glances and gestures. The scene’s culmination here is as dramatic as the first rendition was banal. Laura’s crisis transcends the movie’s otherwise subdued aesthetic, as Lean unleashes every intrusive trick in the cinema-book.
Brief Encounter’s dénouement is quiet and graceful. We have been presented with an irreconcilable experience. There are no right answers in an affair, and the reconciliation of passion and love is not clear. This film’s conclusion is one line long. Just one devastating line that brings everything that came before it into stunning, heartbreaking clarity.
-Ben