1945 – Scene by Green

David Lean | 1hr 26min

The first time we encounter housewife Laura Jesson in the local railway tearoom of Brief Encounter, it is impossible to fathom the depths of her heartache. Her eyes are wide but uncfocused, concealing a complex mix of emotions from her endlessly chatty friend Dolly and the man sitting with them, Dr. Alec Harvey, who abruptly leaves to catch his train. The vague unease that hangs in the air cannot quite be pinpointed to any specific kind of sadness, though by the time the extended flashback which dominates most of the film leads us back to this moment, we are given the context to fully empathise with her. There wasn’t any way for us to know it before, but these are her last few minutes with the man she has secretly spent several weeks falling deeply in love with, and yet who can now only bid a final farewell with a discreet squeeze on her shoulder before disappearing forever.

In the absence of any giant romantic gesture or swooning kiss, this anticlimax brought about by Dolly’s unwelcome interruption is quietly shattering, forcing Laura to retreat into her mind and away from the onward march of an oblivious world. Time is a precious resource in Brief Encounter, particularly at the railway station where her and Alec’s schedules fleetingly align every Thursday where a giant clock imposes on their tiny figures, and through which the echoes of hours and minutes announce each new arrival.

*The railway station is an embodiment of time’s constant passage, hanging a giant clock over Laura as a cruel reminder.*

In essence, this setting is an icon of persistent transience, bringing strangers together every day by a common need to travel before separating them the moment they board a train. The ticket inspector and tearoom owner whose small talk frequently diverts our attention perfectly typify this, teasing a potential romance which never has the time to grow into anything fruitful. Together, they also form a more innocent reflection of Laura and Alec’s covert affair, with all four love interests trying to explore relationships confined to a fleeting moment in time. The romance is intoxicating, but the demands of life never go away, consistently drawing Laura and Alec back to their families at home.

At least within her subjective recollections of the past, Laura is able to exert some control over the flow of time and carry pieces of it into the future. As she returns home and sits down with her husband Fred, she begins to confess her infidelity, though not aloud. Instead, her voiceover pours out what she might have said if the stability of their family unit wasn’t at stake. David Lean starts to leap back into the memories of her affair with Alec here, from their innocent first meeting in the tearoom, through their first kiss, and eventually to that final decision to part ways. Laura’s narration drips with sentimental lyricism, and yet equally infused with it is the heavy guilt that slowly erodes her dignity.

“It’s awfully easy to lie when you know that you’re trusted implicitly. So very easy, and so very degrading.”

*Touches of Jean Renoir in the romantic dates by the river, only barely keeping the melancholy at bay.*

Love and shame are closely intertwined here, both being deeply internal emotions that cannot be openly expressed to the world, and which thus lead to greater repression. Lean’s elegant camera movements and deep focus capture this tension with immense aesthetic beauty, especially drawing on the poetic realism of French auteurs Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne which inevitably leads such romances to tragically fated ends. Clouds of smoke and shadow obscure scenes of blooming passion at the railway station, while the whistle and rattling of passing trains intermittently drown out speech altogether, absorbing Laura into a dreamy reverie that offers an escape from ordinary life. When her relationship with Alex progresses to the point of meeting up elsewhere, lush gardens and babbling rivers begin to host their secret dates, calling back to the nostalgic vacation of A Day in the Country. Meanwhile, the piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff delicately climb and descend scales in romantic accompaniment, though never quite losing track of the sorrow shared between these guilty lovers.

*Expressionism at the train station with the smoke and shadows, making a shady character out of London’s urban districts.*

That this is the same director who would later craft some of Britain’s greatest historical epics in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia is somewhat surprising given the profound introspection of the piece, though if anything Lean is simply proving the versatility of his immense talent. His inspired development of characters may be the strongest similarity between these films, here seeing Laura shrivel into a guilt-ridden shadow of herself as she takes up smoking to calm her nerves, and quietly interprets an accident involving her son as the universe’s punishment.

*Lean portrays guilt with visible unease, forcing Laura to gaze at her own reflection as she tells her first lie, and elsewhere backlighting her sweaty profile.*

Perhaps even stronger though are those moments which visualise Laura’s interiority, imagining an impossible future through double exposure effects which see her and Alec cruise, dance, and wander tropical beaches, and later hanging on her face as she tells Fred her first lie and ashamedly stares into a mirror. The deeper she sinks into her guilt, the darker Lean’s lighting becomes too, as a much greater deception further along sees her silhouetted at a payphone, with only the profile of her sweaty, anguished face vaguely illuminated.

*More reflections, though this time with the fantasy of an impossible future is captured in double exposure.*

Being shot right before the end of World War II in 1945, the hope for some restored order to the nuclear family unit looms large in Brief Encounter, and so there is no disagreement here between Laura and Alec when the shared guilt becomes insurmountable. A job opportunity for Alec in Johannesburg provides the perfect opportunity to make a clean break, but not before a quick journey back through all those locations that they had previously visited together.

For a short second after his train finally departs, a suicidal impulse crosses Laura’s mind. Lean’s camera tilts to the side in a dramatically canted angle as she rushes out to the platform, though panic quickly dissipates into mournful regret, and the rest of her life fades back into view. The dream ends, as does her internal confession, and although Fred has not heard a single word of it there is a quizzical look on his face. “You’ve been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me,” he gently acknowledges with absolute sincerity. Perhaps Laura will may never find the resolution she seeks with Alec, or the same excitement which lifted her out of the monotony of being a 1940s housewife. But if there is any solace to be found, then it is in the love that is still very much present in this modest home, never even requiring such complex sentiments to be spoken aloud in order to be mutually understood.

*A canted angle and strip of light across Laura’s eyes as she faces a bleak future, and her mind disappears into hopeless despair.*

Brief Encounter is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, and the DVD or Blu-ray can be bought on Amazon.

Billy Wilder | 1hr 41min

Don Birnam would like to believe that within his body, there resides two versions of him: Don the Writer and Don the Drunk. Never mind that his sober self collects and stashes bottles of liquor in nooks around his flat, actively enabling his own addiction. With this fancy literary conceit of dual personalities, it is easy enough for him to blame it on his fear of creative failure, and escape culpability for whatever he gets up to while under the influence. There is no doubt he is an intelligent man capable of far greater things than what he is currently achieving in life, especially since Billy Wilder relishes writing his dialogue with loquacious, dramatic zeal, letting him romantically soliloquise the sublime effect alcohol takes on his consciousness.

“It shrinks my liver, doesn’t it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys, yes. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly, I’m above the ordinary, I’m competent, supremely competent. I’m walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I’m one of the great ones. I’m Michelangelo moulding the beard of Moses. I’m Van Gogh painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz playing the ‘Emperor Concerto’.”

*A fine performance from Ray Milland, hitting the highs and lows of this charismatic alcoholic as he struggles with addiction.*

*Some excellent mise-en-scène work from Wilder as well, making use of foregrounds and backgrounds in these shots that tell entire stories.*

Ray Milland’s delivery of such poetic lines goes beyond mere affection. Don is absolutely infatuated with his vice, going to remarkable lengths to satiate its craving, even while recognising it as a foible he must try to keep it out of the view of his brother, Wick, and long-suffering girlfriend, Helen. Minor inconveniences like the fact he can barely sit through an opera featuring actors drinking fake wine barely make a dent in his alcoholic resolve. It is not until the six days that The Lost Weekend takes places over that a steady downward slide sinks him deeper than he ever has been before, dampening his carefree demeanour with enough spirits to finally quench his thirst.

*A number of rings from the bottom of a bottle – a smart cutaway that economically tells the tale of one drunken night.*

*Tracking in on the rippling surface of alcohol, tempting and intoxicating us with its dazzling beauty.*

Wilder is not typically one to make daring stylistic choices, but neither does he let his camera become a mere passive observer in this film, as he skilfully develops Don’s substance abuse and breakdown through several alcohol-related motifs. The Lost Weekend efficiently depicts one drunken night through a simple shot noting the many rings of condensation left on the bar by his drinks. In another composition, the alcohol itself ripples and reflects lights with an overhead angle that tantalisingly pushes forward with sultry temptation, and as Don wanders liquor stores looking for his next dose, Wilder smothers him behind rows of bottles lined up in the foreground, turning the mere shape of them into a visual cue prompting his own compulsion. This conceit pays off again later as well when the distorted shadow of a bottle he previously hid in a light fixture casts a recognisable shadow up on the ceiling, thereby ending that night’s desperate search for a drink.

*The shape of bottles become motifs of temptation, carrying unsettling implications for Don every time they appear.*

Paired with Billy Wilder’s sharp direction is one of Miklós Rózsa’s greatest movie scores, developing a dizzying theme that wavers and spirals in a string orchestra before being passed off to a shrill theremin, where it uneasily underscores Don’s drunken self-degradation. Like the wailing musical saw from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest thirty years later, there is a tragic quality to this melody, similarly seeking to understand the fragility of its cynical male protagonist. It is a testament to the development of Don’s character that we still hold onto some empathy for him even as he hits new lows, where he is driven to stealing purses, holding up whiskey stores, and exploiting romantic crushes. As he sets out to pawn off his typewriter, Wilder dissolves between tracking shots moving down city streets and the alcoholic fully prepared to sacrifice his livelihood and talent, and though we pity him immensely at this point, the narrative is far from done with its torment.

*Long dissolves and tracking shots as Don walks groggily down this street, searching for relief.*

A brief stint in an alcoholic’s ward marks the point at which The Lost Weekend begins to verge ever so slightly on horror, confronting Don with a frightening, raving patient who could very well be a future version of himself. As he watches in fear from his bed at the man being whisked away, the shadow of the hospital doors swing across his face, casting him in an agitated darkness. Hallucinations of bats burying into walls, killing mice, and spilling blood across his apartment plague his delirious mind, until he is finally driven to rock bottom where suicide seems to be the only escape.

*At the climax of Don’s visit to the alcoholic’s ward, the hospital door dramatically swings its shadow across his face, casting him in darkness.*

Perhaps it is Wilder’s marvellous genre dexterity which helps him smooth over the tonal shift that comes in the final minutes, offering Don a real chance at redemption and sobriety. In the hands of a less talented writer, the miracle of his typewriter finding its way back into his hands and Helen’s pep-talk might not seem like enough to undo everything that has taken place, but nevertheless there is a strong formal cohesion to in the conclusion’s mirrored bookends. Where we came into Don’s life with a long take floating from a New York panorama into his apartment window, we leave the same way, flashing back to that opening shot that now moves in reverse, accompanied by his voice dictating the words that will introduce his autobiographical novel. For Wilder to draw such a hopeful resolution from what is certainly among his darkest films is a truly impressive feat, though with a complicated character as richly drawn and sympathetic as Don Birnam, The Lost Weekend deserves nothing less.

*…in the closing shot. Wonderful form from Wilder here, and an excellent camera movement to match it.*

The Lost Weekend is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.

Category: 1945

Brief Encounter (1945)

The Lost Weekend (1945)