The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 11-17
Brief Encounter (1945)
Directed by David Lean
Lean’s adaptation of Noël Coward’s one-act Still Life is somehow a little off, even when the distance between any here/now and a prewar, phlegmatic, firmly middle-class Britain is accounted for. Complacent housewife Laura (Celia Johnson) goes into town weekly to do the shopping and maybe see a film; she meets ambitious doctor Alec (Trevor Howard) at the train station, when he removes a bit of windblown grit from her eye. After a few lunches and country drives, the two admit they’re hopelessly in love, and thus obliged to part forever, since the possibility of leaving their marriages and children is unimaginable. Indeed their social world is lacking in emergency exits; Pauline Kael claimed that “there’s not a breath of air” in this melodrama, but there’s lots of engine steam and rain, contrived and deployed as effectively as a fog machine. But I have difficulty imagining a here/now where movie fog isn’t a thing beloved. Brief Encounter is a film for lovers of trains and Lean; for people who think Anna Karenina was a touch dramatic; for devourers of buns and drinkers of milky tea. Elina Mishuris (May 15, 3:30pm; May 16, 12:30pm; May 19, 6:25pm at Film Forum’s Coward series)