The painful romance of ‘Brief Encounter’
Many great love stories involve a train. Before Sunrise saw Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s characters meet while journeying across Europe, resulting in an incredible tale of romance and connection, while Marilyn Monroe becomes the object of affection for two men disguised as women in Billy Wilder’s classic comedy Some Like It Hot. Then there’s Brief Encounter, which takes its romance to a station refreshment room rather than a moving train, and here, we’re given one of the most painful love stories in cinema history.
Directed by David Lean, the film is one of Britain’s finest exports, blending heartbreaking revelations on romance and freedom with small doses of comedy. It’s a clever tale, opening with the couple’s final moments together, before allowing the plot to piece itself together over the next 80 minutes. What we come to discover is that life can be so cruel, and that human connection can be as beautiful as it can be painful. In fact, human connection can spawn the most intense and unfathomable feelings, and Celia Johnson’s protagonist, Laura, comes to learn the strength of these emotions, experiencing an awakening of her desires.
Despite being married with two children, the monotony of being a middle-class wife in post-war England without a job begins to take its toll on her. Laura does what she is expected to do, sticking to routine and raising a picture-perfect family of one daughter and one son with her husband, but she inevitably realises the depth of her unhappiness. The cyclical routine, the lack of excitement, and her husband’s lack of interest in the things she really cares about wear Laura down, and after a chance encounter with a doctor named Alec at the train station, she soon begins to discover a renewed sense of happiness within herself.
Laura tells her story in a voiceover, as though she is confessing to her husband, and this aids the intimacy of her tale, allowing us to empathise with her predicament as she reckons with her guilt and simultaneous excitement. The pair’s relationship inevitably turns romantic, and you can’t help but root for Laura and Alec, even though they are both married. Yet, this isn’t a simple tale of infidelity; this is about a woman’s struggle to find her place, to strike out from the confines of domesticity, and to live on her own terms after being tied down. She faces the pressures of stuffy societal norms, which affect her own conscience, and which have also resulted in her feeling so unhappy and emotionally repressed in the first place.
Brief Encounter is a beautiful story, but it’s one that ends tragically. The pair can’t be together; sometimes, that’s just the way things are. Things happen that cause our world to shift on its axis, but then we must carry on, regardless, through the pain and the anguish. Lean doesn’t make this an easy farewell, though. The worst thing imaginable happens: they don’t get a chance to give each other a proper goodbye. As they sit in the refreshment room, both unable to cope with the fact that this is about to be it, they are interrupted by a loudmouthed woman who is totally oblivious to the situation.
Like the oppressive and invasive social norms that have affected Laura’s life, the woman barges into the couple’s one chance at a final act of private tenderness; they cannot even have this moment. When Alec’s train arrives, he stands up and squeezes her shoulder – that’s all he can do to say goodbye, and it’s easily one of the most painful yet romantic acts ever captured on celluloid.
Laura is distraught, almost jumping onto the tracks, but she resists, going back to her monotonous life. Her romance with Alec passed through her life as fast as a train shooting past a platform without stopping. In those brief moments, you wonder where the passengers are heading and who they might be, but within an instant, they’re gone, with just the dancing debris of leaves or rubbish on the platform remaining the only evidence.
