
Jennifer L. Knox's
Delirious Hem blog is running people's picks among chick flicks, with brief commentary and a video. Today's choice is
Brief Encounter, featuring "Celia Johnson as a respectable
middle-class housewife and Trevor Howard as the married doctor whom she meets
in a train station. The first meeting is accidental, the second is deliberate,
the start of a love affair, intense though not quite consummated, that is told
from Celia Johnson's point of view and in her voice, to the lushly romantic
strains of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. (And btw, according to the
London
Telegraph of 25 April 2011, Rocky's Second remains the United
Kingdom's favorite piece of classical music, besting anything by Beethoven or
Mozart, undoubtedly because of this film.) Railway stations, and the tea rooms
in them, which were still ubiquitous in my own time as a grad student in
England, are a perfect setting for the lovers' furtive meetings.
They are
dreary, ordinary, impersonal places, although back then, in even the meanest of
them you could get an excellent cup of brewed tea rather than the teabag
variety. The love affair is, in effect, an interruption, a delay, and a slight
detour in the journey of two lives that will never again intersect." For more, click
here. --
DL