I had never even heard of Brief Encounter until 2019, when people recommended it to me after I saw and loved Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen to show how director David Lean was equally adept at big bombastic epics and small intimate love stories. I felt a little skeptical of this film I’d never heard of, so I stuck to another big bombastic epic like The Bridge on the River Kwai to continue exploring Lean’s filmography. I put Brief Encounter on my schedule at one point, fully intending to get around to it, but I just didn’t feel super motivated to watch it. Finally in 2022, I sat down on my couch and watched Brief Encounter, only to discover that the people who recommended the film to me were wrong. Lean’s not equally adept at small intimate love stories after all. HE’S BETTER. How did this motherfucker just drop one of the greatest film romances of all time in 1945, just three years after Casablanca? Hell, according to one poll, the British voted it the greatest film romance of all time (Casablanca was still #2).

While the source material — Noël Coward’s 1936 one-act, Still Life — provides a strong narrative backbone, the screen adaptation by Coward, Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Ronald Neame improves upon it greatly (while wisely not updating it to be contemporary, making it a prewar period piece without the complications of World War II).  In the opening scene, we first see Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey having coffee at a table in the background, the rousing dialogue in the foreground implying that we’re listening to our main characters discussing their day while two unassuming people exist in their vicinity. When we revisit the scene at the end, we see them taking up the entire screen, actually able to hear their dialogue now. And in between, Laura narrates an imaginary confession to her husband about the affair she’s been having with Alec. Sometimes the best films are simple stories told well, and this is one of them. Kudos to Lean for finding Coward’s play boring and lacking in tension and adding the frame story and narration, which gives the film a distinct voice and POV in Laura.

Like Robert Altman, I was initially struck that Celia Johnson, who plays Laura, was “not glamorous, not a babe” (compared to Trevor Howard, who plays Alec and was more Classically Handsome Hollywood Actor), given that when you think of Old Hollywood romantic leads, you’re thinking of women like Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn, but Bergman or Hepburn couldn’t believably sell you a character who frames her romance as one of ordinary people experiencing something extraordinary. As Noel Coward scholar Barry Day notes, she’s “not a great beauty, but she’s the kind of person you could imagine you would love.” And for all that Johnson tells and tells and tells, she’s remarkable at showing and showing and showing, her conflict and struggle written all over her face. God, so much great face-acting from her in this movie. Discussing her on a DVD featurette, actor John Sessions gushes, “She has the most fantastically cinematic face, those incredibly huge luminous eyes which the camera just dives right into.” On that same featurette, however, it was a treat to hear the words of Johnson herself, taken from a letter written to her father after first reading the script: “If they don’t have my beautiful face to look at, they will always have my mellifluous voice to listen to. Lucky people.”

Laura and Alec, star-crossed though they may be, are also lucky people. I haven’t seen a couple more believably fall in love since Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. It’s born from just one single glance, but with every weekly reunion, you can feel them getting closer while simultaneously resisting the desire to get closer. That’s the thing about illicit affairs and clandestine meetings and longing stares. Surely this tale of two strangers falling in love around trains inspired Before Sunrise, right? No wonder I loved it.

At first, I wanted to know more about Alec’s life and his perspective, but I eventually submitted to the fact that this was entirely Laura’s story, and I was all in on her moral dilemma, hating herself for having to concoct lie after lie to keep chasing that dwindling, mercurial high. Laura’s narration is honest to a fault, as we even hear her work through her unkind thoughts about a gossipy acquaintance, so we as the audience have a direct window into her soul. And although Alec shows her colors he knows she can’t see with anyone else, cinematographer Robert Krasker shows them to us in striking black-and-white. While the interior shots generally keep a tight focus on the characters and aren’t too notable, every exterior shot in this movie is fucking gorgeous in its use of shadow and light. And speaking of gorgeous, Lean scored this fucking movie with fucking Rachmaninoff, and sometimes a movie really is just A Vibe, you know, and I’m on it, because remember, I like to have it all, so when a movie has a clear narrative AND a Vibe, it’s the best of both worlds because Lean ensures that every single fucking thing he can do with this movie from the performances to the visuals are making you feel this true doomed love affair in your very soul.

And you know it’s doomed from the moment the title card comes up and informs you that you’re about to watch a brief encounter. They’re both of them married with children, neither one of them in a particular unhappy marriage. They just happened to find something different and beautiful with each other, and the social mores of heterosexual monogamy leave them with no real solution to their emotional conundrum. In going through the Criterion special features, I was struck by the number of times someone described the film as “two honorable people trying to stay honorable.” Laura’s the more hesitant of the two, and Alec knows damn well that for him, she would ruin herself a million little times. What Lean does in restaging and reshooting the opening scene is fucking stunning and devastating in ways I didn’t really think 1940s movies could or would do. By the end of this movie, I was a fucking mess, and I was a mess writing my whole review. What a film.