2 - Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film

Summary

Writing in The Guardian in 2010 David Thomson questioned a recent poll which had named David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) the best movie romance of all times:

In how many other countries would a poll pick Brief Encounter as the best movie romance of all time? Even in Britain, I wonder how many people born since, say, 1975 would rate it so highly. But for a generation that remembers when the trains ran on time and station buffets were as tidy and inviting as the one in this movie, Brief Encounter is etched in nostalgia for an era when trapped middle-class lives contemplated adultery but set the disturbing thought aside. (Thomson 2010)

Thomson's invocation of nostalgia is revealing. As I shall suggest later in this chapter, Lean's film is very much of its time, its narrative of selfsacrifice and decency deeply rooted in the culture and mood of post-war Britain. As Thomson intimates, its charm and appeal for many spectators of the twenty-first century would to a large extent be connected to nostalgic fantasies of an earlier, less complicated society. Brief Encounter depicts a middle-class Britain on the cusp of change, a Britain irrevocably altered by the experience of the Second World War but still clinging to long-held ‘British’ values and behaviours, a deeply reassuring vision, it would seem, to both contemporary audiences and modern-day viewers.

Lean's film is of course famously set in and around a railway station. Lean had originally intended to film in London but due to the ongoing air raid risk relocated to Carnforth in north Lancashire, where the lights from filming were less of a danger. As I shall go on to discuss later in this chapter, the railway station is much more than a location or backdrop for the film's narrative of lost love. Rather it provides a crucial structuring framework for the binaries of arrival and departure, movement and stasis, intimacy and public appearance, adventure and everyday duty which lie at the heart of the film. Milford Junction, the railway station created from Carnforth in Brief Encounter, is itself a place of both movement and adventure and containment and sacrifice. While it brings the film's lovers together, it also contains and ultimately curtails their love affair, returning them to family, duty and respectability.