A Fresh Look at David Lean's Repertoire

I had planned to write about Brief Encounter for quite some time, but for a moment thought I would have to base my column on its IMDb profile. Though I finally found a copy in a friend’s dorm room, there were setbacks. Netflix hadn’t shipped the DVD after ten days of transit, so I decided to go to Kim’s, still in its final throes. I bought Masculin Féminin (Criterion) and Best in Show (not that) at 30 percent off, but no Brief Encounter—and the store was sad and strange. The same clerks who sneered when I bought Miami Vice now lacked their authority. Their store, after all, was being ransacked by grad students buying box sets of The Office. “The boss guy on this is so funny,” said a girl in ballet flats. An era has ended—all the more reason, gentle reader, to leave Morningside Heights for your cinema needs.
In my halcyon youth, I used to go to the movies at least once a week. My Moleskine is studded with memoranda of my misspent hours—ticket stubs from Lincoln Plaza and Lincoln Square. Time is a bit more elusive now. My first night of college this year, I snuck away to Vicky Cristina Barcelona at the Plaza; two women got in a fight over a spilled soda. I haven’t been back yet.

While the Lincolns (Plaza is the stern Abe and Square, in its frivolity, the Mary Todd) are what they are, I especially enjoy seeing retrospectives or revivals of old films. Crying at a 10 a.m. screening of Georgia Rule is all well and good, but a film—never a movie!—at the Forum has not just the veneer of elegant taste, but the thing itself. Each of my columns will present a discussion of a film soon to be revived somewhere in New York.

While watching the Brief Encounter DVD, I wished to be watching at Film Forum (86 min., screening in a newly restored print as part of a David Lean retrospective Sept. 14 and 15), rather than on my petite dorm-room TV. Not simply for the popcorn and espresso—well, not for the popcorn, at least. The espresso would have sharpened my focus on the images, which were hard to decipher on my Toshiba. While this film has a moving narrative, its images are uniquely beautiful as well, hinging on reflections of the actress Celia Johnson’s insanely expressive faces in any nearby shiny surface.

Johnson is a part of the marvelous cinematic tradition of batty British women. Her performance echoes Helena Bonham Carter and Tilda Swinton, as well as the Keira Knightley of Atonement. The film begins with elegant, lingering shots of a pub in a train station, but after introducing us to the surroundings, Lean shows us his heroine in a close-up. Her eyes bug out and her head tilts at a bizarre angle. We don’t yet know the romantic tragedy she has undergone. At the time, I only saw in Johnson’s visage a reflection of my own face. Her Kabuki acting style would be the ultimate alienation effect if it weren’t so familiar to me. I bugged my own eyes out three times in one visit to the Netflix home page waiting for this DVD.

As the film went on, I grew more and more engrossed, both by the plotline (the many details of which I cannot divulge here), and the repeated motifs. The couple’s very first meeting comes when a dashing doctor (Trevor Howard) removes some ash from Johnson’s eye. In a similar way, this film slowly pulled my focus away from open Gchat windows and my burgeoning to-do list. Lean’s direction, Noel Coward’s script, and Johnson’s performance all acted to remove the ash from my eyes. Johnson returns to her husband, as the viewer always knew she would. This is the promise of great cinema, a brief encounter that ends after two hours but leaves the participants changed.

You should attend the brief Lean retrospective. The Criterion DVD is in hateful full-screen format and isn’t even readily available (though, if you hurry to Kim’s, you might nab some NBC comedies—or the smoldering ashes of American independent film!). A David Lean retrospective sounds fuddy-duddy, but the student will likely be glad he added this ticket stub to his journal. For, though trapped in a hopelessly romantic situation, Johnson’s really just like us: at one point, she declares that she wants to “look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was.” I sat for a moment after the film ended, the clock atop my television flashing three a.m. I finished my to-do list and Gchatted for a while with someone who saw James Franco in Butler. I rearranged the DVDs on my shelf, placing the Godards, from Kim’s, together. The ash was back in my eyes; the reverie was over. How silly indeed!

Daniel D’Addario is a Columbia College junior majoring in American studies. Brief Encounters runs alternate Wednesdays.