Director David Lin said that most of all he does not tolerate sentimentality. Is the movie "Short Encounter" sentimental? Is he naive? Today, almost 80 years later, many will say yes. But already at the premiere screenings in some disadvantaged regions of England, the audience reacted to the picture with ridicule and simple clattering. Unresolved passion between the characters puzzled, the conflict was not clear. The silent understanding between the lovers, their desire, which did not go beyond verbose views, is incomprehensible to some, but tells others a lot about the creative principles of Lin and the author of the play Noel Coward.
Lin's fascination with trains, he says, is at the heart of this film. The movement of trains plays an important role in the film, becoming a mobile background for the experiences of the characters.
His approach to portraying melodrama is very modest: the central story begins as if from the periphery. A little knocked out of this modest narrative voiceover monologue: the game Celia Johnson expressive and without explanation.
The Russian viewer will involuntarily cause an additional association: that for the British already lost in the movie soundtrack, for the Russian is the Second concert for the piano Rachmaninov, memorably sounded in another film about love “Spring on Zarechnaya Street” (which may be inspired by “Short meeting”).
At the end of his life, Lin spoke ambiguously about his “first masterpiece”, but never refused it: “Unstar casting, unhappy ending, inconspicuous provincial setting – we deliberately broke the rules.” Not initially accepted by the public, the film, however, became a cult. He received an award at Cannes, an Oscar nomination, and critical acclaim. Many of them felt in the picture this lyrical edge inherent in artistic works: sometimes you can evaluate the work only by experiencing the most similar experience in its entirety.
So in the late 80s The Daily Telegraph writes: In the freedom-loving 60s it was fashionable to ridicule the well-bred anguish of heroes, their abstinence and concern for other people's feelings. But in the 80s, shocked by the HIV crisis, the conflict between loyalty and passion no longer seemed so ancient, the film regained its relevance. "
Brief Encounter retains both emotional power and documentary interest.
The slogan of the film “The story of the most precious moments in a woman’s life!” is puzzling. Married Laura Jesson has an affair with a married man she meets at a train station. The most precious moments in the life of this woman are not a wedding, not married life, not the birth of children, but fleeting meetings on the side with an elderly married man with whom she has no future. Perhaps today this slogan would have worked, but in 1945, when there were other customs and rules in society, this slogan sounds at least strange.
The heroes of the film are one-sided and do not impress the viewer at all. Laura Jesson is outwardly phlegmatic and as a woman is not attractive. Why is Dr. Alec Harvey so attracted to her? At home with her husband and children, she is apathetic and sad, and when she meets her lover from the station, her eyes light up, and the smile does not come off her face. Everything is banal and understandable to such an extent that one does not even want to go into a detailed analysis of this reincarnation. I want to understand the context of her suffering. At first glance, she has a beautiful home, an attentive and pleasant husband, the children also do not stand on their ears, although they do not go to bed until their mother comes home. What has gone wrong in her life and why is she so deeply unhappy? Why did the filmmakers find this information irrelevant? Little is known about her lover Alec Harvey. His story and experiences are less interesting, but in this case it would be useful to know what did not suit him in his personal life. Because of this uncertainty, the motivation of the characters is not clear, and their suffering and throwing seem unnecessary, because we still will be together or not. Rather, I even want them to break up or that Laura’s husband found out about her cheating and made a scandal in which she would finally reveal the reason for her stupidity.
I can’t believe that the film is one of the hundred best British films according to BFI and it is already in second place. Probably, the film should be taken as a fleeting romance of two strangers, which should not be analyzed and taken seriously, but otherwise it does not work.
All of the problems with "Short Meeting" are its poor adaptation for the big screen. Playwright Noel Coward wrote a play for the stage, and it’s likely that all the questions that came up while watching the film – the background and motivation of the characters – are not so important when we have a live scene, we don’t even think about it. But the director of the film David Lin just had to think and pay more attention to these nuances, so that the story turned out to be three-dimensional, and not as if the characters and plot are cut out of paper and pasted into the album.
David Lin is a fantastic director. He can shoot absolutely everything and always good.
To show love when it is not expressed in literal actions is very difficult. For example, in the first scene we see a woman and a man sitting at a table in a cafe. Lin managed to film love so that you feel it physically when you just look at the main characters.
I once read a book written by one of the greatest literary giants. I was struck by how accurately he described a mother's love for her child, down to the tiniest molecules of the soul. When I saw this movie, I had a similar feeling. How does David Lin know that this is how women feel love?
There are a lot of love movies. And there are many films about love, which, due to circumstances, was not realized or was, but too short, not strong enough and full. For example, there’s a good movie called Lovers with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro. But “Short Encounter” is a masterpiece, cooler than which in this genre I have never seen anything. This is a film about the love of a director who knows exactly what it is.
For conscious, not background viewing.
How easy it is to lie when you are believed. Mention made-up events in conversation to hide the real ones. The participation of a liar does not wish others: every moment turns into torture, any rustle makes you shudder. And remember. A man who has stayed in his memory much longer than she, a married woman, can afford. Whether this is what Laura once imagined true love is now unanswerable. She feels and bitterly realizes another thing: no matter how she restrains herself, no matter how hard (and fair!) arguments she finds, she will still go back to the familiar station. And not just because you can’t handle an unexpectedly strong, reckless feeling. Laura doesn't want to hold back. Hours of communication with Alec is a surprisingly true game of herself, a younger and bolder one. No matter how well-established and habitual her life now seems, and the soul still needs tenderness that allows you to feel not only a wife and mother.
There is a subtle line that separates love from falling in love, but sometimes a casual glance, an unexpected gesture, a warm word is enough to feel what, due to age and family status, seemed forever lost. The relationship between two unfree people is not a desire to turn back time, but an attempt to return a forgotten taste for life. The routine creeps up imperceptibly, you do not have time to come to your senses, as you find yourself in the mirror aged and sad. It seems that there is personal happiness, and life is arranged, but for some reason there is still emptiness in the soul. It makes possible what previously seemed unacceptable. She whispers in Alec and Laura's ears that they should not be left behind. The weekly overcoming of shame is justified by the opportunity to swim again in the lagoon of mutual feelings. All this is not for the sake of plans for the future, but for the present, in which a timid hope for happiness so suddenly flickered.
As befits a gentleman, David Lin proved to be a caring companion of Alec and Laura. A walk along the edge of the abyss, fraught with exposure, is full of restrained and sad romance. From the anxious eyes of two lovers, excited words and meaningful silence, one can understand how difficult it is for them to follow the voice of their feelings. If the relationship were simpler and more trivial, “Short Encounter” wouldn’t have half its charm. On the contrary, Lin carefully nurtures the spiritual principle in his heroes. If you follow the “chronology of love”, you can see how subtly and skillfully the director reveals their relationship. Random meetings, a trip to the cinema, dinner in a cafe, walking – it is important for Lin to show how their souls gradually merge. Feelings deepen like trees, they quietly grow roots, closely intertwined in an intricate pattern. It is impossible to break with someone who has already become an integral part of your soul. And endless inner exhortations in the spirit of “so it is necessary” are not able to calm the yearning heart.
It is painful to realize how fragile love is incompatible with everyday life. Lin repeatedly juxtaposes the bland prosaic nature of Laura’s family life with the thrill of new emerging feelings. Ever immersed in the crossword husband looks ridiculous in comparison with the charming and sensitive Alec, which not only favorably distinguishes the latter, but also makes Laura desperately blame fate for turning the once dear to her man into an indifferent neighbor. There is a feeling that happiness must necessarily be dosed, so as not to allow it to become ordinary. But perhaps touching love and you need to “live” somewhere on the platform, and not in a boring bedroom. The magic of the forbidden feeling is very strong in its illogical self-sufficiency, sometimes complicating a full reunion to the point of impossibility. It helps to keep the joy growing from meeting to meeting. Such an ordeal is cruel to a fragile, afflicted heart, but when the long, dull and hideously monotonous evenings flow, it will be remembered with bright sadness. Like a precious treasure kept deep inside.
The impression of the film is comparable to listening to a symphony orchestra. The music of Sergei Rachmaninov can be enjoyed endlessly, noting all the new details in his second concert. So is "Short Meeting." The theme of gaining and separating, desired, but unfulfilled happiness in spirit is similar to her later “Three Poplars on the Swimming”, “Love Mood”, “Interlude” and “Bridges of Madison County”. But next to these beautiful paintings, the David Lin tape retains its uniqueness. It is all about British pedantry, which is often mentioned with sarcasm, but here gives a special atmosphere to the seemingly ordinary plot. It’s hard to explain to someone that you don’t see a future in a relationship, and at the same time you can’t give it up. In emptiness, a strong and devoted love does not disappear - this thought girds a sad picture with tender silk. After finding each other, Alec and Laura changed. To some extent, they became more unhappy, yes. But the beauty of their spiritual intercourse is not in the bitter regret of unfulfilled hopes, but in the intoxicating sensation of a flowing life, returned after years of forgetting. And now it will remain in the heart forever, like pleasant memories, not subject to the destructive effects of time, and forever young, like the first love in life.
Paradoxically, David Lynn’s “Short Meeting” based on the play by Noel Coward is perceived much more Russian than “Doctor Zhivago” directed by the same Lynn based on the novel by Boris Pasternak. In "Short meeting" amazingly captured the genuine spirit of Russian classics - its quintessence, explosive clot. These are Dostoevsky’s Poor People. It's Tolstoy. Chekov. Karamzin. Ostrovsky. All Russian sentimentality is 86 minutes long. Sentimentality, where the characters are not people, but serfs; and the only truly impregnable fortress wall is in their head. Not just the impossibility of happiness, but the pathological rejection of happiness as something dirty, dangerous, obscene, contagious, harmful, deadly and shameful. Sentimentality, where the feelings are a cancerous tumor, and the earlier the surgery, the better the chances of recovery. Where suffering is a duty taken for granted, a routine state of affairs. A good and comfortable duty, for suffering is always near, and unlike the fleeting alien treacherous happiness, one can always rely on it.
I would like to especially note two scenes with the main character near the end of the tape, presumably, which became the object of thoughtless fanaticism on the part of Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevsky, which later resulted in the shooting of the film attraction "Cranes Fly". In the first scene, the heroine in tears runs in the rain down the street - the camera, previously calm and academic, flies behind her, and literally "stands stake" when Celia Johnson suddenly stops. In the second, even more powerful scene, already at the station, the camera still takes Johnson face-to-face, and then begins to bend degrees 15-20. The heroine's world is shattered. It's crumbling. The ground is coming down. She breaks off and rushes to the platform. Still inclined camera captures her distraught, with fear and despair, face at point-blank range - then the expression again subsides, Rachmaninoff's music weakens, the camera returns to a constrained horizontal-academic position. All these techniques twelve years later, in 1957, we will see in Cranes Flying. But Kalatozov and Urusevsky did not understand the essence. They copied external signs, but mechanically and callously, anti-artistically. In Lynn’s picture, the above-described camera solutions are the most tectonics – a meaningful visual embodiment of the inner construction of the characters’ soul vibrations. Tectonics is the inner essence displayed by external means. These are symptoms. Perhaps tectonics is what makes cinema art. And where Robert Krasker’s camera, led by Lynn, makes art, Kalatozov’s Urusevsky camera shows circus tricks. I mentioned “Third Man” in my review of “Cranes Are Flying” for good reason – it was Robert Krasker who worked on that outstanding film by Carol Reed, as he did on his previous film “Departure”, where tectonic expressive shooting is also present and just as beautiful. To add insult to injury (I don’t know the Russian equivalent), in “Cranes Fly”, Urusevsky beat almost the entire film with percussion scenes, while in “Short Meeting” such emotional outbursts occur only twice. And all because Krasker and Lynn understand that the worst thunder comes from the calm, and the constant rumble is just noise.
Recommended similar pictures: "The crime scene" Tesina, "Key" Reed, "Ice heart" Sote, "Eternal return" Cocteau.
I will join those people who liked this picture!This is a melodrama to the bone, I would even say to the very last bone. Its beauty lies in its simplicity, accessibility and, of course, in the wonderful music of Rachmaninoff. It's a good movie. This is a movie about how feelings are born and how difficult it is to erase the past from life. Do you need to delete it?
A man and a woman met by chance. She just went out to the station's porch to see the train, and she got a speck in her eyes. Undoubtedly from this moment begins the love story of two people bound by the knot.
No matter what time people live, no matter what century, year, etc., they will not cease to fall in love. Moreover, they will not stop doing this when both are married. Whether it is good or bad I do not take to judge, but the fact remains that in the quiver of the devil there is always an arrow capable of striking at the heart of good and decent people.
One of the advantages of the film is that the story is conducted on behalf of a woman. And the most remarkable thing is that her voice sounds when she's sitting at home in a chair, telling her husband something that's so hard to admit out loud. Unconditional director's find.
The film is organically filled with intelligent thoughts that in no way go against the general plot component, which makes it attractive not only for visual viewing, but also brings touching notes of sympathy to the characters:
It was crazy, but I felt relieved when I committed the crime.
And what a wonderful scene, when in the early stages of their relationship, he enthusiastically talks about why he became a doctor:
It is a deep, thoughtful desire to do good!
And she echoes him:
You’re just a little younger now, you look like a boy!
Curiously grinning, I ask myself a question, and in our time, there is the emergence of feelings, timidity on the part of men and women, a trembling desire not to offend another person? I ask a question and find no answer.
And I hear Laura's voice in me:
How easy it is to lie when you are so blindly believed, how easy and how humiliating.
Moral: Do not lie, do not deceive people close to you!!
9 out of 10
Laura Jesson is an exemplary wife, mother of two children and the most ordinary American, raised under the influence of strict moral values. But one day it happens that she has to give them up. At the station, Laura accidentally meets Alec Harvey, also a family man, a successful doctor and, in general, a happy man. But the sudden flaring of passion forces them to reconsider all their previous principles and beliefs. Faced for the first time with such a strong mutual attachment, young people are unable to resist it. They have warm, romantic relationships, and their love for each other only increases over time. But deep down, they realize that with each new meeting, the last one inevitably approaches.
With which the action of the film itself begins, which in a couple of minutes makes an elegant pirouette and returns from the quarry back to the place in order to explain to the viewer the essence of what is happening. This technique generally characterizes the manner in which “Short Meeting” is filmed, perhaps the most inventive of melodramas. Constant jumps in time, elegant play with the structure of the plot - all this speaks of "Meeting" as a film, primarily author's. In fact, back in 1946, the main prize of the Cannes Film Festival was taken by this film of the British David Lean, who worked on his creation carefully and painstakingly. And so successful, 67 years later, "The Short Encounter" doesn't look old-fashioned or primitive. This impression is created largely because of the very situation in which the characters of the film find themselves and in which thousands more people in all countries of the world have been and will be. The drama and realism of what is happening is off the scale - in Laura and Alec it is easy to recognize, if not yourself, so acquaintances or friends. But it is not enough to invent a story, you also need to present it. And David Lin serves - on a silver platter, and even with cutlery made of gold. “A Brief Meeting” is an impeccable film not only in terms of plot and direction, but also in all other cinematic aspects, from cinematography to acting. It is a pleasure to follow the natural and soulful play of the duo Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, as well as to watch the work of the camera itself, the colors and angles transmitted to her. “A Brief Meeting” is a rare case where the title of a film reflects its meaning not only for the characters, but also for the viewer. A really short, 80-minute film will be remembered for a long time, as will the characters’ images and faces.
This is a classic melodrama about a short love affair between a married woman, a mother of two, and a married doctor who meet at a train station. And since then, meeting once a week, on Thursdays at the same station, they gradually get closer and realize that they love each other, but whether their relationship has a future.
Before us is one of the early masterpieces of the great director – David Lin, who entered the top ten best directors of world cinema. He also founded the British Film Academy. Its current name is the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). And in honor of David approved a special award, given for achievements in directing.
The script is based on a one-act play by Noel Coward, one of the classics of English drama of the twentieth century.
A movie that everyone should watch. It is very simple, touching and soulful, primarily because of the acting duo Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, in which they feel very good about each other and play so that you believe every word they say. Also adds tension and drama, successfully selected music of Sergei Rachmaninov.
It is worth adding that the film received the main prize in Cannes.