Brief Encounter (1945)
Directed by David Lean
Returning home from a shopping trip to a nearby town, bored suburban housewife Laura Jesson is thrown by happenstance into an acquaintance with virtuous doctor Alec Harvey. Their casual friendship soon develops during their weekly visits into something more emotionally fulfilling than either expected, and they must wrestle with the potential havoc their deepening relationship would have on their lives and the lives of those they love.
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What critics compared Brief Encounter to
Yes, we might recognize that the hand touching the shoulder echoes David Lean’s Brief Encounter and that the transcendent final scene is inspired by the blocking and camera moves (although not the averted eyes) of the Ernie’s Restaurant sequence in Vertigo .
Haynes even steals from the best, borrowing from Brief Encounter, the homage a symbol (in a work that’s full of them) of aiming higher than high.
In scripting Todd Haynes’s Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian romance novel The Price of Salt, screenwriter Phyllis Nagy borrows a structural device from Noel Coward’s script for David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945).
As a homage to David Lean’s 1945 classic Brief Encounter, the film is bookended by a scene in a restaurant where Carol and Therese are interrupted at an inopportune time.
Haynes was inspired by David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a 1945 romantic classic about an emotional affair that similarly begins and ends with the same scene, its meaning deepening the second time.
(Despite its period setting, “Carol” is not overloaded with film-school references, but there were moments when I could feel the undertow of “Roman Holiday” and David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” and Martin Scorsese’s underappreciated “The Age of Innocence.”)
An Asian spin on such classics of forbidden passion and lost romance as 1945's "Brief Encounter" would seem the last thing one would expect from director Wong Kar-wai, best known for such freewheeling, improvisational efforts as "Chungking Express" (1994) and "Happy Together" (1997).
At the Lincoln Plaza, the Angelika.RAPTUROUSLY elegant and deeply sexy in a deliciously restrained way, Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love” is one of the most romantic movies I have ever seen, right up there with “Brief Encounter” and “Casablanca.”
"In the Mood for Love" is a real old-fashioned romance, suffused with unspoken desire -- in the mode of David Lean and Noel Coward's classic British railway station romance, "Brief Encounter," which was also about two married people who fell hard yet stayed apart.
Wong Kar-wai has created a classic of the genre with "In the Mood for Love" that can stand alongside David Lean's "Brief Encounter."
In his latest and arguably best film, In the Mood for Love, he addresses each of those preoccupations in a ravishingly beautiful tone poem that plays like a Chinese remake of Brief Encounter.
He openly acknowledges that this film, in particular, stems from a rich lineage of gothic romances; such as Gaslight, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and the David Lean films Brief Encounter, and The Passionate Friends.
Como un elegante conjunto, Anderson diseña El hilo fantasma con una amplia variedad de referencias que van de la profunda y elegante simplicidad de los dramas de David Lean, como Brief Encounter (1945) o The Passionate Friends (1949), bordadas con destreza hithcockiana (Rebecca, 1940) y con una fantasmagoría femenina que remite más a Mizoguchi (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953), sobre todo como la ambición masculina consume el alma femenina hasta desvanecerla en actos de la más sutil y delicada crueldad.
Far removed from the grandness of There Will Be Blood (or most of Day-Lewis’ other recent projects), the acting-directing duo’s latest is most reminiscent of early David Lean, a Brief Encounter -esque romance that doubles as an unconventional investigation of passion, need and co-dependency.
His scene with Knightley in a London cafe recalls "Brief Encounter" in the sound it evokes of hearts breaking over teacups.
Wright urged him and Knightley to look at mid-century British romances like "Rebecca" and "Brief Encounter," and these actors apparently took those movies, and the restrained but deeply emotional style of acting within them, into their hearts.
One scene in Atonement, when the unjustly separated young couple, bursting with grief, desire and eagerness, meet in a café, teeters on the brink of caricature as their polite, faltering self-control evokes the station restaurant of Brief Encounter.
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Billy Wilder, who won 3 Academy Awards with The Apartment (Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay), said in an interview that the initial inspiration for the movie came after he saw David Lean’s Brief Encounter and jotted down “What about the friend who has to crawl back into that warm bed?” (Note that the majestic score accompanying Fran’s emotional breakdown is reminiscent of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.) Yet in his prolific career that spans over more than five decades, The Apartment came much later for Wilder than David Lean’s classic (due to censorship, he notes) and closer to the tail end of Hollywood’s golden age.
Wilder, who directed and co-wrote the film with longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, once said that his inspiration came from watching the romance classic “Brief Encounter.”
When your movie not only holds up Good Will Hunting as an honored inspiration but makes the Damon-Driver romance seem like Brief Encounter by comparison, it's not a bad time to call someone with some actual experience in directing.
However, this is a movie that's really is about the relationship, and in that sense it has more in common with something like "Brief Encounter" than "La Cage aux Folles."
The British stiff upper-lip, or for that matter Kabuki theatre, has nothing on the cowboy way -- Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain now proposes buckaroos chocking enough emotion into anguished gesture to fuel two remakes of Brief Encounter.
And let us not forget Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in David Lean and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945), of which Oscar Levant may have been thinking when he memorably defined a “women’s picture” as one in which a woman cheats on her husband all through the movie, and in the end he asks her for forgiveness.
We have come a long way from Celia Johnson's aborted adultery with Trevor Howard in David Lean and Noël Coward's Brief Encounter (1946), and even Max Ophüls' and Louise de Vilmorin's Madame de ... (1953).
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"The Bridges of Madison County" from 1995 is an old-fashioned love story for adults, an updated "Brief Encounter" if you will, and as such it's probably the gentlest film Eastwood has ever made.
The film fits securely into the tradition begun before there were even movies, but given its finest cinematic expression in Brief Encounter : the "single spark of joy in a life of constant routine" tragic love story.
Eastwood and LaGravenese adopt the rough form of classic movie melodramas like Brief Encounter or All That Heaven Allows, but render the clichés so realistically that the ache runs deeper.
Slight and familiar but sweet enough for Saturday night, Before We Go is the umpteenth re-up of Brief Encounter, not that there's anything wrong with that.