Brief Encounter- the film

lol!
Berilll!

I absolutely love it. I love your dh too!

I love this film and I feel sorry for your DH OP, he must have been so disappointed after your reaction when it's so meaningful to him. This is why I don't lend people my favourite books, in case they hate them!

Does your DH catch the train to work? If so I bet he's scanning the tea rooms for an emotionally restrained lady with something in her eye today.

I do love the film but I also like an alternate interpretation that I read once; Laura doesn't actually know anything about Alec. They have no mutual friends. He may not be a doctor at all, he might have made up the story of moving to Africa in order to end the relationship when he realised Laura wasn't going to give him easy sex after her fit of conscience in his friend's flat. He might be an utter cad who picks up women on stations every week.

The children had hilariously posh accents. Could barely understand them!

It’s so different when the man is the one anxiously waiting for the love of their lives return isn’t it. And it’s beautiful bc it’s so rare/ unlikely to happen. Like the opposite of the beauty and the beast tale where the gorgeous bloke falls for the dowdy young woman and sees beyond outward appearances.

If it were a tearful woman waiting for her husband to come back and not shag some woman he met on his daily commute we’d be wanting to throw bricks at the screen no doubt lol

The film came out at the end of WW2 and I suspect captured a bit of the zeitgeist.
I’m sure difficult circumstances led to a few short term relationships (forged in tragic/stressful situations or perhaps due to greater freedom etc). But the theme is that sacrifices had to be made for the greater good.
it’s of its time and fascinating for that reason.

I love Casablanca much more though - for the humour as much as anything else.

"We don’t take instruction from films-if we did, we’d either be faking orgasms in coffee shops or boiling up bunnies."

😂😂

Incredibly moving. Rachmaninov helps.

@Tigerthatcametobrunch -cinema is art and fantasy-not earnest homilies on how we should behave in the ‘real world’. It’s where you can vicariously experience heartbreak, joy, grief and humour and be absorbed in the drama of the actors’ and film makers’ creations. We don’t take instruction from films-if we did, we’d either be faking orgasms in coffee shops or boiling up bunnies.

It’s fab! In those days I think only posh folks went to RADA and the ‘cockney’ or other working class accents are often hilarious!

Ive seen it a few times and its boring tbvh crap.
Each time ive seen it it seemed worse.
It reminds me of the film leopard in the snow.
No matter how many times you see it it just seems worse than the last time.
I love a romantic film but a film with some drama and a story line.

I appreciate your emotional response 🙂 l really do.
Suppose maybe its just the acting or actors doesn’t come across on this particular film. I find it very easy to get tearful normally too lol!

@BusMumsHoliday

Lovely post. I went through something very intense 30 years ago and thought it was all going to kill me. Now it’s barely a memory. Life moves on.

Love this film. The beautiful accents of Laura and Alec and the faux accent of the lady running the buffet; a cockney but with an attempt at sounding middle class. The sheer frustration when on their last time together the awful woman who interrupts and dominates as the time ticks away for the arrival of the train. Laura loved her husband but her life was dull and boring. Seeing Alec and going to the cinema once a week was something she did just for herself. She felt it was wrong and her guilt wouldn’t let her continue. The film has to be viewed through the lens of the time it was set x

Comment from another user on another board "I developed a friendship with a much younger F colleague (I'm M). I kept it from my wife as I knew she would go apeshit. It wasn't physical but we couldn't just not see each other. We had such lovely days at NT places for cream teas and walking our dogs. Someone dobbed us in with a camera phone and it all blew up and she went mad. It's all resolved now but I so adored her. It was a bit like the movie Brief Encounter. That bit of heart ache and what could have been." Its absolutely boke. I just can't see fantasies about someone other than your partner and what life might have been as anything other than betrayal.

Regarding the Moral Police, it must be nice to be so sure of yourselves so you can damn someone else. BE is moral-it’s a story of how two people unintentionally fell in love and then decided the pain would be too great to be together. Another great Noel Cowards screenplay is This Happy Breed-always makes me cry and I love how forgiveness and stoicism are themes. Try to watch it if you haven’t already.

I read an article about it years ago. The author said it was a propaganda piece, government sponsored, as just after the war too many people were having affairs or splitting up, and this film shows you that that is not the way to behave.
I recall that in the film the man's friend is extremely disapproving when he discovers that the friend he lent his flat to was going to use it to have an affair. So the film does show the social disapproval.

The author also said that the French just didn't get it. A French audience was calling out to the screen 'just get on with it' or words to that effect, i.e. go ahead and have extramarital sex, it is not a big deal.
I can't possibly comment on the French.

I think this is really at the heart of its poignancy. It touches on a truth that the things that feel most deeply important to us in the moment, that seem to shape us as people, often leave no traces. The affair never really starts, they both return to their partners; for all intents and purposes it never really happened. But for Laura and Alec, it meant everything, and it's not even that it will be forgotten, it's that it never even was.

Edith Wharton also gets this absolutely bang on in the conversation between Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in the Met Museum in The Age of Innocence. They talk about how, with the distance of time, things lose their charge and don't seem to matter; that we'll never be able to really touch how things felt to those who experienced them, because the traces of those things don't remain. It's such perfect writing.

Actually the bit of the film that I particularly enjoy is the way Myrtle Bagot, the tea room manageress, pronounces the name of her assistant, Beryl, it cracks me up every time and I end up walking round the house shouting Beryl, Beryl in exactly the same way. There is probably no hope for me at this stage.

Im going to watch it now, I have never seen it.

People fall out of love, and of course it’s the right thing to do to end a relationship if you fall in love with someone else, but sometimes it’s just not possible. Especially back then. I would not judge anyone.

To me the attraction is in the poignant quality of ‘what might have been’. I think a lot of people can relate to the experience - either of a chance encounter, or perhaps a past friendship or relationship- which we feel could have potentially blossomed, but didn’t for various reasons. Perhaps we regret not taking a chance we once had?

But also, to me there’s something very magical about an emotional affair- where everything is yet to come (at least in our imagination, if not in reality) and the object of our fantasy/desire remains perfect and untainted by the banalities of everyday life.

Sigh.

It's not my very favourite film but

that bit where his friend comes back to the flat and finds them... the tawdry nature of their relationship; is it romantic love? Sexual attraction? Where does it cross the line and how do people perceive themselves? Justify their actions?

I presume that scene was quite shocking at the time.

My ds asked me the other day why I like old black and white films and, apart from all the usual stuff about story, character etc, I find them fascinating in what they reveal in the culture of the time.

Great film! Whilst you may not approve of them having a very brief emotional encounter, it is something that happens to most people at least once in their lifetime and therefore worth writing about.

Maybe we could join up at Christmas when it is on and have a moan 😀

Blimey, agree with you wholly! This appraisal has completely missed the beauty of the film which was so nuanced and about so much more. It’s about the quiet intensity, the unspoken, the longing as depicted in Celia’s narrative. It’s also very much about the ordinary person and struggles they no doubt faced in the real world as we still do now. The trains with the noises and steam I’m sure p,ay into the intensity and passion no doubt and probably also remind of how the two characters were so close to just getting on it and leaving everything behind if they wanted. I thought it was so beautiful and the ending is just bittersweet but also you know deep down likely the ‘right’ thing and so ultimately the movie reminds everyone how serious infidelity actually is and sort of safely delivers both people back to their families. And it is heartbreaking how Celia is so broken at the end but obviously she’s strong also as she went back to just carry on with her old life. And she’s had this major battle and no one to share it with because of course it’s taboo and wrong and maybe that’s where a lot of her tears come from the frustration that she can’t even unburden herself once she has done the right thing.