Let’s get one thing straight from the start: they kiss in
Brief Encounter! Yes, they do. They kiss under the railway station, they kiss up on the platform, they kiss on the river bridge, and then they kiss, torridly, while fumbling in front of the open fire in an empty apartment. Here, the embrace becomes so intense and the intentions so deliberate that our supposedly stoical protagonists, Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), are denied an earth-shattering bout of extramarital intercourse only by the untimely return of the owner of the apartment.
And yet, in a bizarre act of collective cultural denial, most observers misremember David Lean’s 1945 classic as a chaste affair. An official review on the BBC’s website is typical when it says that, romantically, “nothing happens” between the straying couple, while a Los Angeles-based cineaste reporting for the Internet Movie Database is more revealing still when he writes: “This passionate pair never even exchange a kiss.” Even the great New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, when writing about the film in the summer of 1946, just days after seeing it, could only conjure up the vaguest notion of interpersonal contact with the poetically oblique line: “For a brief spell they spin in the bewilderment of conventions and their own emotional ties.”
The reason for this amnesia is that Brief Encounter is defined by what it denies, not what it permits. It has become a classic movie romance, if not the classic movie romance, precisely because of its monumental refusal to consummate the affair of its own star-crossed lovers.
It is a film, written by a privately gay man (Noël Coward), that defends and even celebrates the tragic impossibility of the unattainable relationship. Yet it’s also a film written by a publicly patriotic man that gives a warning of the dire consequences to the national character if this same relationship were suddenly attainable. “It came at the end of the Second World War when England was in danger of losing its morality,” says Coward’s biographer Sheridan Morley, in the documentary A Profile of Brief Encounter. “It’s the last bastion of good behaviour, the last film that says: ‘Don’t give into your heart! Simply do your duty!’ ”
Context, of course, is everything — even in 1945 the Herculean moral restraint on display in Brief Encounter was contestable. Lean recalled sitting in horror in a cinema while a mainly working-class audience laughed derisively at his film’s po-faced rectitude. He would later claim that his protagonists might have been “screwing like rabbits” were it not for the demands of the Rank Organisation, the movie’s upstanding studio home.
Yet it’s precisely this same anachronism, this sense of slightly overdone and oddly artificial restraint, that casts such a long and imposing sha-dow on the entire history of serious screen romance since.
Films such as the 1984 Robert De Niro-Meryl Streep two-hander Falling in Love explicitly attempted to recreate Brief Encounter’s romantic tension and searing self-denial. The two stars play decent yet gloomily married New Yorkers who meet on a train, fall in love and spend the rest of the film scrupulously avoiding hanky panky. It’s all very Howard and Johnson, but in the context of mid-1980s modern metropolitan America it seems at first odd, then dramatically wearying, and finally just plain dull.
Similarly, Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair is meticulous in its re-creation of Brief Encounter’s repressive wartime middle-class milieu and the agony of unfulfilled passion between the very married Julianne Moore and the very tortured Ralph Fiennes. This time, however, Jordan’s answer to the film’s crisis question of consummation is to throw caution to the wind and to insert some very 21st-century sex scenes into a mid-20th century romance.
The resulting scenes, mostly featuring loving close-ups of Fiennes’s buttocks, seem to tear at the very heart of the story. Though Jordan’s stated aim was to re-historicise the Brief Encounter-type romance within the “real” social and sexual context of the 1940s, the film does not feel any more real because of them. If anything, the sex scenes make the film more unreal.
Romantic movies all have the same dramatic motor: the overcoming of obstacles on the path to love. With speedy consummation of passion now more acceptable both in society and on screen, modern films have a problem: how can they keep their love-struck protagonists as far apart as possible?
Death is usually your best bet here. Look at Ghost, Shadowlands, The English Patient or even Titanic. In all these films, the price you pay for sex is an appointment with the grim reaper. It’s as if, in purely filmic terms, the dramatic tension diffused by a physically consummated relationship must be quickly re-established by the introduction of an incredible crisis in the lives of the lovers. This is graphically illustrated by the brutal slaying of Patrick Swayze in Ghost. Howard’s Dr Alec should consider himself lucky that Johnson’s Laura never actually “put out” for him — he would have undoubtedly ended up in pieces under the 5.40 from Milford.
Even B-grade romances such as Message in a Bottle, What Dreams May Come, City of Angels and Untamed Heart can’t resist the allure of postcoital death, while those romantic movies that avoid death usually employ some arch contrivance to keep the lovers apart. In Sleepless in Seattle it’s physical distance, in Notting Hill it’s the price of fame, in Forever Young it’s time travel, and in Pearl Harbor it ’s an execrable script.
In every case these movies are emulating and making formulaic what was once natural in the narrative kernel of Brief Encounter. There are, however, some exceptions. Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love sustains the circuitous story of two simultaneous extramarital affairs solely through the power of art direction, musical score and the depiction of unreleased sexual tension. Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, again owing a lot to Brief Encounter, gives us two lost and lonely souls (Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson), both separately married, both drifting around a modern metropolis in search of meaningful human connection. Unlike Falling in Love, though, when the couple deny themselves an illicit physical relationship it seems utterly appropriate to the film’s airy, wispy and non-corporeal Japanese dreamworld setting.
Even Brokeback Mountain, despite its scant and curiously tasteful sex scenes, owes a debt to Brief Encounter. The cowboys in question might as well be Johnson and Howard, meeting on a mountainside instead of a railway platform, with a moralistic world standing between them and the possibility of true love.
Of course what these romantic classics are really doing, at a chromosomal level, is articulating the impossibility of desire. As any Freudian will tell you, and as any Buddhist will agree, the most fundamental human truth is that there is nothing beyond desire. Desire is its own ineffably unsatisfying end. The end of desire is simply more desire. Thus what the genuinely romantic movie aims to do, and what Brief Encounter does so efficiently, is to freeze the story in a giddy state of agitated desire. Here, untouched by disappointment, and in the everlasting flush of romantic arousal, the film can happily perpetuate the myths of permanent romantic love, of finding Mr and Mrs Right, and of the final and fulfilling satisfaction of human desire. But with lots of kissing on the side.
Brief Encounter is currently on cinematic re-release across the UK
WHEN LESS WAS MORE
It Happened One Night (1934)
Sparky roommates Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert sleep chastely in single beds separated by a makeshift curtain. When their rapport develops, the camera moves in on a raunchy shot of the curtain falling to the floor.
Duel in the Sun (1946)
The antagonistic lovers Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones passionately pump each other full of lead in a climactic and blatantly orgasmic shoot-out.
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr lock lips on the Hawaiian sands. They are instantly creamed by a foamy breaker. “I never knew it could be like this,” gushes Kerr.
North By Northwest (1959)
Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint prepare for bed in a speeding train. “You’re a big boy now,” quips Saint, falling into Grant’s arms. On cue, the train slides effortlessly into a tunnel.
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. A roaring fire, a chessboard, and lots of lipstick — check mate!
