Brief Encounter

Movie Review: Brief Encounter

Year of Release: 1945
Country of Origin: UK
Director: David Lean
Cast: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey, Cyril Raymond

Plot outline: Meeting a stranger in a railway station, a woman is tempted to cheat on her husband (IMDb).

Being no more than an expansion of one of Noel Coward's one-act plays, Brief Encounter is an intimate drama, limited in every respect to the brief and extremely poignant romance of a married woman and a married man. And virtually all of the action takes place in a railway waiting-room and in the small English town adjacent thereto, where the couple make their fleeting rendezvous. That's all there is to the story - a quite ordinary middle-class wife, contentedly married and the mother of two children, meets a similarly settled doctor one day while on a weekly shopping visit to a town near that in which she lives. The casual and innocent acquaintance, renewed on successive weeks, suddenly ripens into a deep affection by which both are shaken and shocked. For a brief spell they spin in the bewilderment of conventions and their own emotional ties. Then they part, the doctor to go away and the wife to return to her home. There are obvious flaws in the story. The desperate affection of the two develops a great deal more rapidly than the circumstances would seem to justify. And the cheerful obtuseness of the lady's husband is more accommodating than one would expect. But the whole thing has been presented in such a delicate and affecting way - and with such complete naturalness in characterization and fidelity to middle-class detail - that those slight discrepancies in logic may be easily allowed. Under David Lean's fluid direction, Celia Johnson gives a consuming performance as the emotionally shaken lady in the case. Unprettified by make-up and quite plainly and consistently dressed, she is naturally and honestly disturbing with her wistful voice and large, sad saucer-eyes. And Trevor Howard, who has none of the aspects of a cut-out movie star, makes a thoroughly credible partner. Excellent, too, as characters in a flat, middle-class milieu are Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey, Cyril Raymond and Everley Gregg. (NYT)

My judgement: **** out of 4 stars