Written by Andreas Babiolakis

This review is a part of the Palme d’Or Project: a review of every single Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival. This is a Grand Prix winner: what the Palme d’Or was originally called before 1955. Brief Encounter won for the 1946 festival and was tied with ten other films.

The film was selected by the following jury.
Jury President: Georges Huisman.
Jury: Iris Barry, Beaulieu, Antonin Brousil, J.H.J. De Jong, Don Tudor, Samuel Findlater, Sergei Gerasimov, Jan Korngold, Domingos Mascarenhas, Hugo Mauerhofer, Filippo Mennini, Moltke-Hansen, Fernand Rigot, Kjell Stromberg, Rodolfo Usigli, Youssef Wahby, Helge Wamberg.

Growing up, I knew David Lean as the master of technicolour epics like Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Dr. Zhivago. Of course, one little film has never been forgotten by the world, but younger me wasn't aware of it. Looking backwards as a teenager, I was then introduced to Brief Encounter, and I was anticipating an early look at how a perennial director found his footing. Nope. Instead, I found a smaller film that carried as much passion and intensity, if not even more, than the aforementioned films. As far as romantic dramas go, Brief Encounter is one of the finest you may ever find. It is far from a forgotten relic, fortunately. Time didn't neglect it because it didn't match the technical achievements of Lean's later works: masterpieces simply won't go down that easily.

Noël Coward's short play Still Life presented the longing between lovers that weren't meant to be. Part of the draw was that you fill in the empty spaces yourself as a viewer. You'd think that the meddling of a filmmaker who does the work for us would get in the way. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. Lean knew that part of the appeal was the mystery. He and his writing team (which included both Lean himself and Coward) shifted this sense of wonder to the worry of what would come next (and, subsequently, what would ever happen after the events of the film). We could see everything else, with Lean and company colouring in the empty spaces behind our characters. We still did some of the work ourselves, and it may have been the heavier duties that we now had to fulfill individually: facing the inevitability of heartbreak because things just weren't meant to be.

Laura is unhappy with her marriage, and Brief Encounter actually begins with her hypothesizing about how she will announce to her husband that she has been having an affair. Before you jump to conclusions, this film isn't about championing cheating. It's just an analysis of the right people meeting at the right place but the wrong time. Laura bumps into Alec, who is also married and has a family. The two of them aren't looking to hurt their loved ones. They just so happened to fall for one another and speak the same language. You can label this a romance, sure, but I feel like it is actually a tragedy: love found within the devastation of all involved. They continue to bump into each other by accident, before plotting each meeting from there on out. This fantasy seems like it can work. It will work. Everything is going to be okay.

Except it won't be. And both Laura and Alec can recognize this. They have to accept that they're meant to be, but they also aren't, because they met each other too late. With all of this fate and serendipity comes the sickest luck of all: a botched farewell. They calculated their futures together and how often they would meet again and again, but they never took into account how to properly send each other away. If that isn't heartbreaking, I don't know what is. Of course, Brief Encounter only gets sadder when its Hollywood ending really isn't a happy one at all: just a mended one. Should this connection have even been made? Are Laura and Alec better off for having met, or worsened by the damnation of knowing what could have been? We will never know. We see a small hint of Laura's fate of acceptance within regret, and that is our final piece of the puzzle. Wow.

Laura and Alec are played tremendously by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, respectively. During a time where many romances were passionate and optimistic on the bit screen, these two performers had to channel the worst of lovelessness on the big screen and in a small picture. Lean was forever a dreamer, and even the most minuscule of his masterpieces leaps off the screen with such an epic force. You don't need four hours here to be effected. Brief Encounter is such an efficient film, being able to tell the story of entire lifetimes, predicted futures, and aching hearts in just an hour and a half (and without too many characters or sets to boot). There's nothing more than pure direction, storytelling, and acting here that makes Brief Encounter an absolute must-see film of the 1940s. Every Film 101 class should show this, particularly because of how well it succeeds with just the barest of basics. It may have been one of the more concise of the Grand Prix winners of 1946, but it is easily one of the best, and it knocks most of the other winners over effortlessly.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.