A TIMELESS STORY

Film analysis of Brief Encounter (1945) in relation to the idea of ‘quality cinema’

Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) is a melodrama film aired during the wartime that shows the unfortunate affair between Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey, both happily married and decent people who fall in love without realising it. It’s an adaptation of the play by Nöel Coward Still Life, who is involved on the film production as well. This essay intends to analyse the film and demonstrate that Brief Encounter (1945) is more than just a melodrama pastime film, often associated with feminine spectatorship, and has more deep and transcendental details that make it part of the quality cinema.

One thing that makes a good cinematographer is his/her background as cinema spectator, just like reading makes a writer a good one. We could say that intertextuality is a good resource that good authors have been using all over time. The king of intertextuality is Quentin Tarantino, who has explained himself that his films have several gestures to classical films. The start of cinema is is honoured in many films with the constant use of trains. Cinema started with L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (Louis Lumière, 1897) by the Lumière brothers. On it, we see a steaming train arriving to the station. On the contrary, Brief Encounter (1945) starts with the opposite. The first shot we see after the production credits, is the train leaving the station with all the smoke covering the platform, where we, as spectators, are placed (Figure 1). This make us see that we’re going to discover something really important that has happened inside that train station and not on the train or where it goes. The story we need to care about is on that platform, and that’s why the author let us see the train disappear and let us just waiting there. Here and just here, is the place he can finally name his work (Figure 2) and start presenting us who are the cast and crew of this piece.

After the credits, David Lean signs his work and we see a train arriving to the station but not stopping, this is an express train tat will be important later on the film as Laura, the main protagonist and our narrator, tries to commit suicide. As the express passes, the camera follows it, but just to end on Albert’s face of satisfaction (Figure 3). He’ll be the one who will introduce Laura and Alec to the scene.

Right from the beginning, this film has a strong obsession with time, and we can see it with Albert, an employee that controls the express train passing on time (Figure 3). There’s clocks everywhere (Figure 4) and all the characters are worried about time passing. Train stations are places where people usually cares about time because trains wait for no one, and the meaning of a minute can be decisive. In this film, we can appreciate a lot of evidences of time hurry, just like the need of catching the train on time, the differences of time spent between an express or a diary train, and how the fortuity lovers need to squeeze until the last second of their last encounter, in vain. Besides, time does also take part in the montage. The film is presented later on by the mega-narrator as an evocation of Laura’s imagination, the memories she has about her affair. So time is presented in a way only cinema can play: we see the end at the beginning and after that, we start discovering what drove the characters to that end. When we first see Laura and Alec together, we don’t know the story yet, but we’re actually watching the very end of it: how they’re sorry for parting away but feeling relieved also by keeping their decency and loyalty to their respective marriages (Figure 5). But we see them from away, it feels like if we could get any closer we will get inside something very intimate and fragile. That’s why the camera stand on Myrtle and Albert conversation (Figure 6) as their romance should be what’s interesting for us on that moment, but just until Dolly comes to place and interrupts the lovers’ last minutes together (Figure 7). This is the very end of the story, but is what the author presents us as the start and that will permit him play with time, by the use of flashbacks. Dyer says that “the life of Brief Encounter (1945) is in the tension between this well-madness and the film’s emotional currents” (48: 2015).

The first time we see their parting, we interrupt the lovers with Dolly (Figure 8), we hear their conversation (Figure 9) as we pay attention to Dolly’s things while she fix her makeup (Figure 10). The camera stays with her talking with Myrtle, the waitress, while the express train passes through the station (Figure 11). Later, we’ll see the empty table and Laura entering back with an odd expression in her face, but we’ll see her from far away in a long shot. We feel as out of place as Dolly, as we don’t know the story, and that’s why the camera let us stay with the old woman. This is because we don’t know the intimacy and the feeling Laura has on that moment, we can’t imagine that she has just tried to commit suicide and that we’ve been witnesses of one of the most sad moments of her life by letting Alec go. We are not yet prepared to see it properly.

On the contrary, when wee see this scene again through her eyes, the whole situation changes. We feel the pain she feels and we feel emotionally attached to her, we are empathic with her, now that we know what’s been happening, the camera shows it. This time, we’re not with Albert and Myrtle conversation but with Alec and Laura’s (Figure 14). We’re sharing with them that moment of intimacy being sit with them on the restroom, and wee see them in a close up, being able to see their facial expressions and their sorrow. Laura tells him “I want to die”, and he convinces her not, saying “we still got some minutes together” as Dolly finally comes in (Figure 15). But we don’t see her, like the first time, we’re sitting and looking at the lovers (Figure 16). We know what will happen, because we have already seen it, but now we feel different about Dolly’s interruption. Now we see the conversation all over again, but this time from Laura’s own feelings. The camera doesn’t show us Dolly talking, like the first time, it makes a zoom-in while all the light and sound disappears and we get into Laura’s mind: that’s how we get to see her pain and sadness (Figures 17, 18, 19, 20 ). The bell for Alec’s train is the only thing that brings her back to reality. Unlike the first time, now we appreciate how Alec touc in Laura’s shoulder is full of meaning and love (Figure 21). When Dolly is getting her make up, we doesn’t listen to her speech (the camera doesn’t even show her clearly) (Figures 22, 23) but Laura’s own thoughts (Figures 22, 23, 24) and when she gets up to the station, we follow her instead of Dolly (Figure 11). In this shot, we see how Laura’s mind is in trouble, we reach that hysteria characters have been talking about during the whole film and we see she’s unstable. Everything around her is crumbling down, twisting, and she feels dizzy, like she could fall at any time (Figures 26, 27, 28, 29). This state of danger and panic stays in the unsteady camera until she finally reaches the express train (Figure 31). Here we can see on her face that she has thought about trowing herself down the train (Figure 32), but eventually the sanity comes back to her, she gets frightened and feels sorry for herself (Figure33), she doesn’t believes what she could have done (Figure 34) and comes back inside the restroom with Dolly.

Once she gets back to the restroom, we see that the shoot is no longer bended as in figure 29, now we see Laura standing again with all her sanity (Figure 35) and the camera makes a parallel shot with Laura’s expression while sitting on the restroom in Figure 24 and now, in Figure 36; with the difference that now she’s shown in a zoom-out in her own couch and acting like a melancholiac narrator (Figure 37), by telling all the affair to Fred, her husband (Figure 38), who acts like an audience for her, just like us.

After all these camera movements we can guess that the whole plot is actually a flashback told by a, maybe, unreliable narrator. The whole story has been told trough Laura’s view, so she might be fooling us, trying to make us think she’s actually the good and decent person we’ve been shown the whole plot, but maybe hiding some parts of the story for her, and this makes it evident with the use of the Rachmaniov only when Laura is in a voce off, inside of her world. Everything we can possible know about the story is what she’s revealing to us, so we just know what she wants us to know. Just like in Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), where Leonard tricks us to believe he’s actually the good guy and that everyone is messing up with him, but he’s the only one trying to hurt himself, we could think that Laura is unreliable as a narrator because the film also starts with the end. But unlike him, Laura seems to be telling the truth, because we can see that her character background is well worked on the script: she’s a thoughtful, kind and decent woman who feels terrible by something that she can’t control. We have seen her as a human being with needs, feelings and troubles. She’s feeling guilty and that’s why she confesses the story to her husband, like Richard Dyer explains on his book “the story is told through guilt and remorse, like a Catholic confession” (24: 2015). The story makes it so easy for us to feel sympathy for her, as what she’s confessing could have happened to any of us, is a timeless plot. Dyer says that he felt that “many of the emotions it mobilises are not in fact things of the past: betrayal and deception, divided loyalties, the pull between safety and excitement, cosiness and abandon” (10: 2015). The beginning and the end collide to show, finally a hidden reality in which, we discover something that we didn’t know at first and that we could not possibly understand, but that will take form as the flashback starts to show us everything. Laura sees her brief encounters as she was on a screen, like she was looking to the representation of a dream, so we can’t be sure whether the story is real or made up.

If we analyse the film from a feminist angle, we could see that the pressure of the guilt is always on Laura. It may be because we’re knowing her feeling, but it may also be because of the patriarchal society that puts that guilt on her. She’s the one that has to chose between passion and duty, between an adventure or the routine. However, we appreciate that the story’s main character is her and, analysing it with the psychoanalytic approach we can see it is not like the ordinary Hollywood cinema we’re used. Brief Encounter (1945) gives the woman a voice to tell her own story, to explain the world like she sees it. The feminine audience find similarities with Laura, as she reads the same books they do and the story that happened to her is like those impossible romantic stories, and she’s telling it to us like a friend would a confession, a secret in intimacy. We might support the idea of the unreliable narrator if we think that she could have make the story up in her imagination in order to make her marital life unconventional and excited. But the way the story is told puts the public in a privilege position, showing them what’s into the private life instead of focusing into the exceptional. This thought is only seen by the montage, so it proves that this film is not just another film.

We could catalog Brief Encounter (1945) as a melodrama inspired in the theatre of the wartime, but having in consideration the context of the film, we see that the film is trying to demonstrate reality, the audience needed distraction from the chaos and misery and a story that could seem normal during everyday life (not in war). It was refreshing, it made people feel free for a moment and reminded them their normal lives before war. This reality that the film offers means to Dyer “the rendering of an observable social world in an unobtrusive manner” (48: 2015), that even being fake, will provoke a sense of reality and normality to the audience. So, even if at first sight the film may look another classic pass-time melodrama, this analysis show us wrong, because the camera movements, the lightning and the deep meaning of the script make Brief Encounter (1945) part of the quality cinema.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dyer, Richard (2015): “A Lovely Film” in “Brief Encounter”, BFI Film Classics (British

Film Institute), pp. 8-68

FILMOGRAPHY

Lean, David (1945): Brief Encounter (Cineguild)

Lumière, Louis (1896): L’arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (Société Lumière)

Nolan, Christoper (2000): Memento (Newmarket Films)