Brief Encounter (The Criterion Collection)
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DVD details
Actor: Celia Johnson, Cyril Raymond, Joyce Carey, Stanley Holloway, Trevor HowardBrand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Italian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 86 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-06-27
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of Brief Encounter (The Criterion Collection)
DVD Review: An adaptation of Noel Coward's play "Still Life", director David Lean does a fantastic job with the film adaptation
Summary: 4 Stars
"Brief Encounter", a film which shared the 1946 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and earned Celia Johnson an Academy Award nomination for "Best Actress" in 1947 was an adaptation of "Still Life", a play by English playwright Sir Noel Coward ("Around the World in 80 Days", "The Italian Job", "Easy Virtue", "In Which We Serve"). The film was directed by David Lean ("Oliver Twist", "Summertime", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago", "A Passage to India") who directed Howard's 1942 film "In Which We Serve".
Before David Lean became the multi-award winning director for his later films, "Brief Encounter" was the fourth and final film he would work with Noel Coward.
The film revolves around a suburban housewife named Laura Jesson (played by Celia Johnson, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", "I Believe in You", "Play for Today") who says goodbye to a man in a tea house who leaves by train, as the two are having a conversation, Laura is interrupted by an old friend and for some reason, we see the anguish in her face. A sense of desperation as she returns home with such sadness. We see Laura return to her husband but it is then she tells us her story. She is a woman who has had an affair with another man.
We learn from Laura that she was an ordinary woman, with an ordinary life. Happily married with two children, she goes on with her daily life riding the train into town and checking out a book to read at a local store, going to lunch with friends and enjoying a picture.
While she goes to the tea house at the train station, while waiting for a train one evening, some grit gets into her eyes. That is when she meets Dr. Alec Harvey (played by Trevor Howard, "Ghandi", "To Catch a Spy", "Battle of Britain") who helps remove the grit from her eye.
It started off quite innocently as the two would see each other while she was on her way to some engagement and Alec, a general practitioner going to his work at the hospital. But one day, while she is eating alone at a restaurant, Alec joins her (since the restaurant was full of people and had no open seats). The two have a great discussion and we learn that Alec is happily married with children. Laura showing her kindness for helping her with removing the grit in her eye, the two go to catch an event at the Palladium.
But the two start to realize they enjoy each other's company. They would meet with each other, while she would lie and call her husband that she was out with a girlfriend. But both start to realize that they are falling in love with each other and know what they are doing are wrong but their hearts tell them not to deny their love and spend time with each other in secret. But for Laura, emotionally it is so difficult because she is married with children and knows it is wrong. But to make things worse, her female friends start to see her having lunch with another man, making Laura feel guilty and stressed that they are talking about her being with another man.
Both know that they can't keep this fling hidden but now is the time that they must decide whether or not to follow their hearts and stay in love with each other or to say goodbye and go on with their own lives.
VIDEO & AUDIO:
"Brief Encounter" is featured in black and white (1:33:1 aspect ratio) and for a film that was created back in 1946, this 54-year-old film looks great on DVD. Blacks are nice and deep, whites/grays are vibrant and clear. It helps that the cinematography and the shots and camera positioning was well-done and captured the various mood of Laura. May it be her making a phone call to Alec or running through the rain, Robert Krasker ("Romeo and Juliet", "Alexander the Great", "The Running Man") did a wonderful job in capturing the emotion of this film.
As for the picture quality, according to Criterion, when they started the film-to-tape transfer, they were able to access most of the original film elements and found the various positives and negatives, they found in the 35mm fine-grain master positive to be exemplary. Especially since it was made from a nitrate camera negative thus capturing the rich blacks and having perfect image quality. In fact, Criterion included a comparison of the restoration made to "Brief Encounter" with the before and after showing how much dust and scratches were removed. Of course, the picture quality is not perfect as you do see a few dust particles and scratches but the fact they removed thousands of instances of dirt and debris was well-done and this is the best this film has looked until now.
As for the audio, the audio is presented in Monaural and dialogue is Dolby Digital 1.0 and the Rachmaninoff score are center channel driven. I chose to watch the film with my home theater receiver set to stereo on all channels to have a more immersive soundscape experience for "Brief Encounter".
As for subtitles, there are English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
"Brief Encounter" comes with the following special features:
* Audio Commentary - Featuring audio commentary by film historian Bruce Elder who discusses the film and also the career of David Lean, Joyce Carey, Celia Johnson and Stanley Holloway. Also, the adaptation of "Still Life" to cinema. There is one section and this relates to Elder talking about a scene with Dr. Alec Harvey and his colleague which I totally agree with him and how that scene was a bit abrupt to the film. Interesting enough, how this abruptness was an inspiration for director Billy Wilder for his film "The Apartment". But for the most part, an informative commentary track.
* Restoration Demonstration - (1:54) Featuring the before and after restoration video shots.
* Theatrical Trailer - (2:57) The original theatrical trailer.
* Colors Bars - For those who need to calibrate their television set.
* Insert - The insert booklet features a two-page essay on "Brief Encounter" by Adrian Turner, a British film journalist and critic and author of books on Billy Wilder, Hollywood in the 50's and the making of David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia".
JUDGMENT CALL:
It's quite interesting to watch a film such as "Brief Encounter" because we see extra-marital affairs in film as common place in cinema. But we don't really see a film that focuses on the actual affair and how one deals with it emotionally. In this case, through the eyes of Laura Jesson as she takes the viewer from the beginning of the relationship and seeing how it matured, to talking about the female friends that she has and just the emotional turmoil she goes through of knowing she has a family but knowing that she loves Alec so much.
Both know they love each other but they have significant others and children and they are behaving inappropriately that it starts to take its toll on her. For Alec, he could care less...he's very much in love with Laura but for Laura, it's the lying and hiding that starts to break her each and every day. She knows its wrong but her heart continues to tell her to go for love and she is torn between her conflicting emotions.
It's also important to emphasize that back in the mid-1940's, extra-marital affairs was not as significant as they are today. Sure, divorce rate is high now, extra-marital affairs seem to be commonplace in cinema and people tend to go for personal happiness while family was emphasized heavily during that time. But Laura's life was mundane and like many housewives, a common routine of taking care of the husband and children and it was a repetition of the same things over and over again. She was an ordinary woman that did not expect this to happen to her.
We definitely get two different perspectives of the wife and her obligation to family with Noel Coward's "Brief Encounter" and "Easy Virtue". Both female leads are torn with what they should do with their situation as married wives but with Laura, there is nothing to gain by pursuing personal happiness. For Laura, it is a different time, a different era and she has more to lose.
Both Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard provide a fantastic performance. I enjoyed the cinematography and the use of "Piano Concerto no. 2' by Sergei Rachmaninoff (played by Eileen Joyce) throughout the film. The DVD doesn't include so much in terms of special features but then again, this was the Criterion Collection during its earlier years on DVD where some releases just had the insert, so the fact you get a scholarly commentary track is a plus. It's also important to note that the film looks absolutely great on DVD and Criterion did a fantastic job on the remastering.
Overall, "Brief Encounter" is an enjoyable film that keeps things simple. No need to stretch the film past its 86 minutes and despite one scene that the historian Bruce Eder points out in the commentary, for the most part this film is very well done. A romantic film showing us how love can happen unexpectedly but how love can easily be lost. "Brief Encounter" is definitely worth watching.
Description of Brief Encounter (The Criterion Collection)
From Noël Coward's play Still Life, legendary filmmaker David Lean deftly explores the thrill, pain, and tenderness of an illicit romance in the dour, gray Britain of 1945. From a chance meeting on a train platform, a middle-aged married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) enter into a quietly passionate, ultimately doomed love affair, set to a swirling Rachmaninoff score. Criterion is proud to present Lean's award-winning masterpiece a beautifully restored digital transfer.To many, Brief Encounter may seem like a relic of more proper times--or, specifically, more properly British times--when the pressures of marital decorum and fidelity were perhaps more keenly felt. In truth, David Lean's fourth film remains a timeless study of true love (or, rather, the promise of it), and the aching desire for intimate connection that is often subdued by the obligations of marriage. And so it is that ordinary Londoners Alec (Trevor Howard), a married doctor, and contented housewife Laura (Celia Johnson) meet by chance one day in a train station, when he volunteers to remove a fleck of ash from her eye (a romantic gesture that, perhaps, inspired Robert Towne's "flaw in the iris" scene in Chinatown).
It so happens that their schedules coincide at the train station every Thursday, and their casual attraction grows, through quiet conversation and longing expressions, into the desperate recognition of mutual love. From this point forward, Lean turns this utterly precise, 85-minute film into a bracing study of romantic suspense, leading inevitably, and with the paranoid, furtive glances of a spy thriller, to the moment when this brief encounter must be consummated or abandoned altogether. Decades later, the outcome of this affair--both agonizing and rapturous--is subtle and yet powerful enough to draw tears from the numbest of souls, and spark debate regarding the tragedy or virtue of the choices made. A truly universal film, with meticulously controlled emotions revealed through the flawless performances of Howard and Johnson, and an enduring masterpiece that continued Lean on his course to cinematic greatness. --Jeff Shannon
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