Brief Encounter (1945)
Directed by David Lean
Based on Still Life 1936 play by Noël Coward
Starring: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey, Cyril Raymond, Everley Gregg, Margaret Barton
Plot Synopsis: (via Wikipedia)
Brief Encounter is about British suburban life on the eve of World War 2, centering on Laura, a married woman with children, whose conventional life becomes increasingly complicated because of a chance meeting at a railway station with a married stranger, Alec. They fall in love, bringing about unexpected consequences.
My Opinion:
Oh the sexual tension!!!
Figured I should watch a romantic movie for Valentine’s Day. As I’m finding current movies less & less romantic (unless they’re Pixar!), I’ve decided to explore older movies a bit more. So I went with Brief Encounter, a story about a married man & a married woman who meet & fall in love & have to decide how they’re going to deal with that since they’re married and have kids & all that malarkey. Okay – I have to be careful how I review this as the hubby likes to have a little peek at my blog sometimes…
I really liked this movie. Two things I actually really liked were that a) they were middle-aged and b) they were quite plain looking. Nowadays everyone has to be young & beautiful, especially in romantic love stories. It made them seem very real and I was able to believe the love story more because of it. And, yeah – just because you’re middle-aged and have kids doesn’t mean that you lose all interest in romance & aren’t capable of having a passionate love affair.
Holy crap, though – talk about repressed British people. My god how things have changed in the UK since 1945. The poor woman in this constantly looked like she was painfully constipated because she couldn’t handle the stress of being in love with someone other than her husband. She even kept getting all faint. Nowadays in the UK they’d have a quickie in the bathroom on the train and that would be that. But I certainly don’t want to see that movie. I know plenty of people would rather see that more modern version of Brief Encounter but I’ll take it as it is, with all that great sexual tension & frustration. I think I’d much rather live in that time when people were “proper” and polite. But then I remind myself that I’d have to be a good housewife then and actually learn how to cook & sew & all that bullshit. So, maybe I’ll stick to living in 2013 (with some good old-fashioned black & white movie romance thrown in here & there).
My Rating: 8/10
Cinema Parrot Disco 