| Nate Logsdon |
Brief Encounter plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, July 19th, through Sunday, July 21st. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
A man and a woman, dressed formally and speaking properly, sit in a crowded restaurant and mock the efforts of a string trio supplying background music to the chattering lunch crowd. The camera zeroes in on an earnest, bespectacled cellist, whom the well-dressed couple makes a point of disparaging.
Turning back to their own conversation, the man asks the woman, “You don’t play the piano I hope?” She assures him that she does not. He’s pleased, and unsurprised.
“For all you know I may have a tremendous burning professional talent,” she protests. He’s certain that she does not. Why is he so sure? Because, he tells her, she’s too “sane and uncomplicated.”
Music, emotion, complication—these are not for sane, sedate, middle-class married people. But neither are heedless extramarital love affairs.
David Lean’s 1945 masterpiece Brief Encounter, based on the play Still Life by Noel Coward, tells the modest story of an unconsummated romance between Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard). They meet only a few times, most often in a train-station refreshment stand, falling in love and behaving in a secretive manner that is unnatural to them. Their handful of meetings are narrated in a series of flashbacks by Laura on the evening of the day when they decide to part forever, having realized the impossibility of the relationship.
Their affair is an interruption in their predictable lives, an encroachment on their senses of security and correctness. Their first encounter occurs when a piece of coal dust lodges under Laura’s eyelid and Alec delicately removes it. When they later have their first planned encounter, Alec becomes excited talking about his primary research interest in the respiratory health effects of air pollution caused by local coal-mining operations. The smoke-haunted photography compounds the doctor’s preoccupation as a motif of pollution and contamination recurs throughout the film. Irritating environmental and human factors intrude upon the lovers as much as their affair has intruded upon their ordered lives. The sense of disruption extends to the sonic realm; even the musical score is drowned out by train horns in the film’s opening moments, initiating a recurring struggle between beauty and noise, quiet memories and obnoxious patter. But music will carry the day.
Brief Encounter is almost always mentioned in association with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor (and vice versa). It’s one of the more unbreakable bonds between a film and piece of classical music in movie history, as perfect a marriage, in its way, as Strauss to 2001 or Tchaikovsky to Fantasia: once you’ve seen it, you’ll never be able to hear the music without visualizing the picture. The concerto—in a recording by pianist Eileen Joyce performing with the National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Muir Matheson—comprises the entire film score, weaving between the diegetic space of Laura’s living room, where it is playing on the radio, and the soundtrack where it shades the narrative and photography. As the music both triggers and accompanies Laura’s flashbacks it becomes the emotional tenor of her memories.
In his contemporaneous review of the film in The New Republic, Manny Farber wrote that “[i]t deals, as few films do, with limp, orderly, repressed, unexciting middle-class people, and carries them through the most exciting event of their lives in a limp, orderly, repressed, unexciting way, the only way of which they would be capable.”1 But emotional repression sources dramatic tension and the couple’s inhibitions are sublimated into musical expression.
Their cellist-mocking dialogue in the restaurant suggests their discomfort with the abstract, sentimental, impractical connotations of an interest in music. But the film shows this attitude to be fraudulent, or at least penetrable. Rachmaninoff’s music intrudes on Laura’s domestic life, carrying her from a room where she sits with her newspaper-reading husband into a recent past filled with furtiveness, transgression, and passion. The concerto exists on the mental plane, provoking the interior voice of her memory which, hidden from society, can indulge the true emotions that her “sane and uncomplicated” persona is required to hide.
The music is in fact more poignant because it communicates abstractly what the characters are constantly struggling to say concretely. As in many British films, the stiff-upper-lip posture withholds feeling only to delay its release. For instance, in David Lean’s This Happy Breed (1944), the second of his four Noel Coward films, Celia Johnson plays another woman who buries painful feelings under strictly maintained no-speaking rules until inevitably she relents in a deeply healing moment of acceptance. Another film that comes to mind is Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996) which pushes unbearable tensions from family mysteries to a devastating breaking point that washes over the characters and leaves at least one viewer sobbing uncontrollably in shock and relief. But in Brief Encounter, the dam-breaking doesn’t happen for the characters in the course of the narrative. Their one attempt to make love at a borrowed apartment becomes a humiliating debacle when the tenant comes home early. The closest they come to an effusive display of emotion is when they’re laughing during a Donald Duck cartoon at a matinee. Even as they part for the last time (which, in this non-linear story, is also the film’s opening scene) their final goodbyes are, characteristically, interrupted by a clueless, talkative acquaintance, leaving them to exchange embarrassed glances instead of expressing their feelings. Instead, catharsis and affect are relegated entirely to Rachmaninoff’s music.
Incidentally, the music-silence dialectic, as well as the theme of interruption, resonate with the story of the concerto’s composition. After the disastrous 1895 premiere of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony—rumored to have been led by a drunk conductor—the young composer suffered years of depression and writer’s block. After undergoing hypnotherapy in 1900 he finally broke his creative silence in 1901 with the premiere of the Second Concerto, dedicated to the hypnotherapist whom Rachmaninoff believed cured him.2
The concerto was an immediate triumph and became his best-known piece of music as well as a mainstay of film soundtracks for generations. One interesting instance is Frank Borzage’s I’ve Always Loved You, released just a year after Brief Encounter. In that film, a pair of romantically-involved concert pianists engage in a decades-long spiritual struggle centered on performances of the Second Concerto freighted with gender and sexual politics.
Another music-oriented movie of that era to consider is Edgar G. Ulmer’s classic B movie Detour, made the same year as Brief Encounter. Detour’s narrative is also activated when the protagonist hears a song and is sent into a voiceover reverie. The music’s emotional valence evolves through the film, beginning as a source of promise and happiness when he performs it with his girlfriend but souring into a cruelly mocking “dirge” (or, as actor Tom Neal stresses it, “DIRGE!”) as his fortunes change. Detour is a definitive example of film noir and Brief Encounter, in look if not in genre, shares many elements of film noir’s visual language: the chiaroscuro lighting, the monstrously enlarged human shadows, the grimy beauty of billowing smoke, streetlights reflecting off wet streets. In fact, it was shot by Robert Krasker, the cinematographer of essential noir The Third Man and Odd Man Out, which share recognizable pictorial genes with Brief Encounter.
Rachmaninoff’s music colors the imagery of Brief Encounter like another lens, sometimes deepening a scene with an unexpected mood. Listen, for instance, to the heart-swelling piano theme from the concerto’s first movement as Alec describes the varieties of lung diseases caused by different types of industrial dusts. Or wait for the moment toward the end when the score finally turns to the sublime theme from the Adagio sostenuto movement as Laura realizes—beneath a massively foregrounded war memorial statue—that the affair cannot continue. A police officer questions her for being out alone at night and she walks away feeling “like a criminal.” But the music is almost unbearably beautiful, suggesting the perfection of her guilt, the glory of a failed romance. Because it will never be consummated—will never even be—the affair in this moment becomes the music: a permanent, irrational, unsayable, exquisite yearning.
Footnotes
1 Manny Farber, Farber on Film ed. Robert Polito (New York: Library of America, 2009), 209.
2 Fiona Maddocks, Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile (New York: Pegasus Books, 2024), 45-47.
Edited by OIga Tchepikova-Treon