★★★★★
Dir. David Lean. 1945. N/R. 86mins. Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway.
Nighttime; a railway station in Britain, circa WWII. An express train races through the smoky darkness, Rachmaninoff’s second Piano Concerto rages, and a man and a woman — their intimate tête-à-tête interrupted by a prissy acquaintance — silently say farewell, his hand lightly gripping her shoulder in lieu of a kiss. What led devoted housewife Laura Jesson (Johnson) to this point? The memories flood in after she arrives home to her husband and two children: that speck of grit that flew in her eye all those months before, which brought Dr. Alec Harvey (Howard) to her aid and led to an impulsive, mostly chaste affair. A love, of couse, that couldn’t last.
David Lean’s classic weepie, adapted from a Noël Coward play (Still Life), is sheer perfection — the gold standard of tragic romances whose influence can still be seen to this day. (Andrew Haigh’s recent indie Weekend gave the basic template a queer twist, and plenty have interpreted Coward’s story as a coded gay romance.) Johnson and Howard’s repressed passion could fuel an English tank battalion, and the shadowy black-and-white cinematography — a love story drenched in noirish tones — looks especially gorgeous in this new 4K restoration. But it’s not all tears and anguish: Lean and Coward leaven the film’s inevitably upsetting outcome with a few pointedly satirical asides, the best of which is a movie-within-the-movie (Flames of Passion) that does all the emoting Brief Encounter’s prim-and-proper protagonists can’t.—Keith Uhlich
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