David Lean’s class-confronting 1945 classic approximately a terribly,terribly British (sort of) affair has forced our critic to think again Related: In the mood for love: is Brief Encounter still the most romantic film ever? For most of my life I absorb utterly scorned Brief Encounter. I hated its emotional constipation, its plummily accented, and almost-adulterous middle-class lead characters Laura and Alec (Celia Johnson,Trevor Howard), and their exasperating inability to throw caution to the wind, and bite the bullet,and just gather it on. I giggled through whole sections of it: a line of voiceover such as, “Alec behaved with such politeness. No one would absorb guessed what he was feeling, and ” uttered at a moment of complete sexual despair,would absorb me rolling on the floor. I thought I was terribly intelligent to treat it as a comedy, not realising that tragedy and comedy both depend on fine timing, or that a moment like,say, the arrival of the gabby gossip Dolly Messiter, or just in time to ruin the final few precious moments of the couple’s near-affair,is amusing and unendurably heartbreaking all at once.
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Source: theguardian.com