This is obviously a pick for the Marriage and the Movies course but we would have eventually gotten around to watching it anyway because it’s widely considered one of the greatest romances on film. It’s one of David Lean’s earliest directorial efforts, who would later go on to make such cinematic classics as Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s also the last of four films that he worked on in collaboration with playwright and scriptwriter Noël Coward.

Apart from being British, Brief Encounter sets itself apart from the previous picks in being a romance between middle-aged, unglamorous people. It tells the story from the point of view of Laura Jesson, a respectable, middle-class housewife. Every Thursday, she goes into town to do her weekly shopping, has lunch and then goes to the pictures before taking the train back. On one such occasion, a doctor Alec Harvey and shares a table with her since the restaurant is too crowded. Enjoying each other’s company, they decide to go to the cinema together and so their relationship takes off.

One complaint I often level against romantic films is when they feel like a wish fulfillment fantasy for one half of the couple as if the other person just appeared out of nowhere just ready to be the perfect partner for them. A great example of this is Silver Linings Playbook. To some extent, this is true for Punch Drunk Love as well. That Brief Encounter completely avoids this is one reason why I like it so much. The burgeoning romance feels organic and natural. The audience can see how both characters have well-established lives of their own and yet can be tempted by the gentle tug of romance. That both are surprised and even frightened by the emotions they experience grounds the scenario further. It’s because we are convinced that both persons are real people that their feelings and their plight move us.

The rich inner thoughts of Laura, played by Celia Johnson, is directly conveyed here using a first-person voiceover that only the audience can hear. This can be a clumsy narrative device but this film makes it work by framing it as a personal flashback in which Laura imagines herself confessing of her affair to her husband. Without that narration, it would have been difficult to capture Laura’s struggle between her yearning for this love and that it is a betrayal of her husband and the moral values to which she subscribes. As others have noted Brief Encounter is very much a product of its time and its plot wouldn’t stand up in the very different moral and social climate we have today.

It’s not just that affairs are much less of a scandal now and divorces are more commonplace, the whole film is set in a world which no longer really exists, including the notion of the middle-class as the moral backbone of society, how women in England used to commute to town weekly for shopping, even how they have a cup of tea while waiting for their trains. Lean captures all this in beautiful but unassuming black and white photography. This sense of nostalgia, that this is film about a class of ordinary people of a bygone era, adds immeasurably to its charm. It’s no wonder that the train station with its period features that much of it was shot in is still a place of pilgrimage for fans.

There’s much more that could be said about this quiet masterpiece, how Laura’s wardrobe emphasizes her ordinariness and lack of glamour for example while Lean’s photography subtly accentuates her beauty only when she is with Alec, or how the various supporting characters of a lower social class are all engaged in romances of their own in the background. We were especially happy to recognize Stanley Holloway, today best known for his role in My Fair Lady, as the master of the train station who flirts with the owner of the tea shop. I’d content myself to declaring that this film does indeed deserve its place as one of the greatest romantic movies of all time