Brief Encounter: Aristotle, faerie sight and grit in your eye…

Brief Encounter (1945), 1946 UK release, directed by David Lean, screenplay Noel Coward, starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard

Written by ©Judith Noble, November 2025.

Professor Emerita (Film and the Occult)

Brief Encounter has classic status; one of the most beloved of British films; the ultimate weepie, British audiences cited it as the film most likely to make them cry. Its reputation has grown in the last forty years; time has changed our appreciation of it. It was moderately successful on release, but out-performed at the box office by The Wicked Lady. It was characterised on its release as a quality

film that would attract middle-class audiences. Now here it is in a season of melodramas.

Let’s look a little closer at the film’s appeal: why does a black and white 1940s movie that revolves around just two very middle-class characters (with the kind of accents that are only heard in comedies these days) living out gender stereotypical roles that barely exist anymore, and who, by modern standards, do not really get up to very much, still attract audiences eighty years after it was

made?

The film retains a tremendous emotional power. Some years ago, I had the salutary experience of teaching film narrative to animation students at an arts university by screening examples of classic films. Part of the post cinema generation, these students had never seen any classic films before. My practice was to screen the first half hour of the film (due to time constraints) then discuss what was going on, and leave the students to watch the rest in their own time. When it came to Brief Encounter, the outcome was startling. At the end of half an hour, the students begged me not to stop the screening, so we watched the whole thing. By the end, all the students were weeping. Many of them were very shocked that the film had elicited this response, although I had forewarned them

about its power. I spent the lunch hour comforting distraught animators.

Brief Encounter is being shown today in the context of a season of melodramas, often a very undervalued genre. A melodrama can be defined as a film where music is a fundamental element of the narrative. It is also usually a film made for female audiences, with a story told from a woman’s point of view, and full of emotional highs and lows. Brief Encounter is certainly all of those things.

The music especially is a key: Rachmaninov’s dramatic, romantic Second Piano Concerto played here by Eileen Joyce (a very popular female performer when the film was made). I think the film is also rather more than a melodrama.

It may surprise people to learn that in the 1920s and 30s the key textbook for Hollywood screenwriters was Aristotle’s Poetics. How many of them used it to good effect is open to debate, but Brief Encounter fits Aristotle’s definition of tragedy perfectly: the characters try to escape their pre-ordained fates; the audience empathises with them in this; the drama evokes feelings of pity for

them, and at the end the audience experiences an emotional cleansing or catharsis.

This is a film about two, small ordinary lives, but it is no less tragic for that; the characters cannot escape their fates and we weep for them. It is, of course, perfectly okay to weep when watching Brief Encounter and indulge in catharsis as approved of by Aristotle. There is so much we could say about this film. To some it may seem dated and class ridden, and some of the humour has to be explained to younger audiences. The phrase, “getting a girl into trouble”, for example, has lost its risqué meaning. Eighty years after its making, surely there are no

middle- class nuclear families with cut glass English accents, two perfect children and a servant to make dinner anymore? But… surely anyone who has loved “the wrong person” will see something of themselves in this film, and recognise the power and danger in desire that can tear lives and families apart. Perhaps too, the film will appeal most to those who have shared the experience of its

main characters: an older audience with more life experience; to those who “do the right thing” and who do not allow illicit desire to disrupt family and relationships, but who will still be changed by it forever.

Part of the film’s success lies in the fact that it is incredibly well-crafted and precisely made in a particularly British, tweed jacket kind of a way. Acting, mise-en-scene, camerawork, are all more or less perfect.

It has strong links to the theatrical tradition: The confined interiors, the close focus on the two main characters, and the comic working class characters used as foils for the protagonists which date back as far as Shakespeare (think of the ‘rude mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) but is completely cinematic, for example the close up of Dolly’s mouth as she talks relentlessly, and the tracking shot that opens the first refreshment room sequence and establishes the characters. The spare, matter of fact acting and camerawork and the pace of the film, hurried along by the plot device of the railway timetable, mean it never descends into sentimentality. It has wry moments of comedy, mostly at the expense of the popular culture of its time. Please do look out for the

wonderful comic cameo by the ineffable Irene Handl.

It is a “woman’s story” and told throughout from Laura’s point of view; she narrates it. But look, she is not just telling us her story; she is telling it in her mind to her husband, Fred, the one person to whom, as she says, she will never really be able to tell this story. It is important to note, though, that there are no women behind the camera here; we have Lean and Coward telling a woman’s story.

The role of Celia Johnson is absolutely pivotal, and her performance is extraordinary. She is on screen for almost all of the film. Notice how she has to act silently in several sequences, conveying extreme emotion without speaking on camera, while telling her own story in voice over. She comes across as a much stronger character than Trevor Howard. I find his actions have a difficult coercive

undertone; he continually forces Laura to admit more, do more, overcome her scruples, and this makes her moral dilemma all the more frightening and compelling.

Just as the protagonists are dominated by their societal roles and rigid convention, so the plot is dominated by time. It is structured through the railway timetable which allows the lovers only brief bites of time together before they must catch their trains home to their families.

As well as the narrative, the music, the Rachmaninov concerto, belongs to Laura: we only hear it through her (it stops when the camera focuses on other characters) and it signifies her desire for Alec, so the symbolism of Fred asking her to turn the music down as she sits overwhelmed by emotion, is almost unbearable.

The film is often described as “realist”: Its rundown realistic locations and sets are a million miles from Hollywood scenarios, or from other lavish British films of the period (The Wicked Lady, for example), and the characters wear understated everyday clothes; it is trying to look just like the lives of its intended audiences.

It has always been recognised that Brief Encounter, written by one of the most well-known gay men of his generation, has a gay subtext, and it remains a favourite with queer audiences. The film is based on Coward’s play, Still Life , and we should note here Kneehigh Theatre’s wonderful live theatre production of Brief Encounter, first performed in 2007 and directed by Emma Rice, that

draws heavily on Coward’s original theatre piece. We can read the love affair in Brief Encounter as emblematic of the fleeting unfulfilled desire that was the experience of gay men at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence. Richard Dyer’s book on the film for the BFI Classic Films series

explores in detail the many pleasures of Brief Encounter for queer audiences. In 1990 Richard Kwietniowski (who subsequently directed the feature film Love and Death in Long Island) directed a witty, elegant short film, Flames of Passion; a gay re-imagining of Brief Encounter.

Brief Encounter has for me a strong link to the world of fairy tales and archetypal storytelling. In the inciting incident. Laura gets a piece of grit in her eye, and Alec removes it. This is what everyone remembers about the film and it has been used in comic sketches and advertising down the years. This metaphor of “something in the eye”, of fear of blindness, which is specifically referred to here, and of another kind of sight is common in folk tales; think of the splinter of ice in little Kay’s eye in The Snow Queen. Faery ointment confers the ability to see into Faerie and bestows inner vision on mortals and may be dispensed by faeries or by mortals working for the faeries. But this second sight, this inner vision is a precious and secret thing; only meant for mortals if gifted to them by the

faeries, and not to be stolen or taken by accident. If you admit to having it without permission, disaster will ensue. In one folk tale which has variants across Wales, Cornwall and other parts of Britain, a mortal nurse hired to look after faerie children accidentally gains the sight through misuse of faerie ointment. She admits to her faerie master that she can see him; he asks her which eye can

see him, and immediately blinds her in that eye. This kind of magic vision, gained by Laura when the grit gets in her eye, is a very dangerous thing. She did not ask to be given it but it will change her forever. It enables her to “see” Alec in a new and shocking way; to look and to desire; were she to admit to this, she would lose everything. Notice how, when the flashback sequence starts we see

Laura sitting on a chair at home with her workbox, seeing herself in her inner, magic vision, looking into the inner world of the film and her last meeting with Alec. In the café, when Alec starts to explain to her about his medical specialism, she says “I see” repeatedly. There are metaphors for vision throughout the film, not least when we watch the lovers in the cinema watching a film. When we

see Laura looking through the window of the railway carriage, she is looking intently, but seeing her new inner worlds and the object of her desire rather than her everyday surroundings. Brief Encounter reminds its audience repeatedly of this archetypal storyteller’s trope of the second sight, the faerie vision which is full of pleasure, danger and tragedy in equal measure.

Please remember: Its okay to cry.

Watch a clip of Flames of Passion; a gay re-imagining of Brief Encounter.