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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Homage and critique powered by intelligence and love., February 18, 2002
'Brief Encounter' is both celebrated and despised as THE British film par excellence. The story of a short liaison that never gets beyond boat-rides in the park and a ham-fisted rendezvous in a friend's flat, the containment of transgressive emotions within a stiff-upper-lip sensibility is seen as quintessentially British. The film is also a major example of what is known as the 'woman's picture', one whose address (its story, mood, feeling, allusions, assumptions) is primarily to women.It is both these received opinions Richard Dyer, Britain's finest academic writer on film, wishes to investigate, using, as he says, the heroine's own method in telling her story, adapting his in the light of personal experience and knowledge from others. The film's status as a woman's picture is ambiguous - the story is told by a woman (in other words, she has narrative authority), and coloured by her sensibility and the habits of her cultural consumption (the books she reads and films she sees); on the other hand, her internalised confession cannot find voice within the male-dominated world of the film. In any case, this 'woman's picture' was written, directed and made by men. Dyer, with great sensitvity, explores the many ways in which 'Encounter' offered women a space to articulate their own inner lives and social positions, as well as asserting the claims of patriarchy on them. The film's 'Britishness' is even more problematic. 'Encounter' was not a mass success, and its image of 'Britain' - English, middle-class, middlebrow, white - is very narrow and hardly representative of the major differences within one class, never mind the different classes, races and worldviews that constituted Britain even in 1946. Dyer show how the couple's limiting their own desire is echoed in the way the film's middle-class whiteness insists on distancing itself from the social and racial Other. Nevertheless, he argues: 'A nation's characteristic culture may on inspection usually be a narrow and class-specific one, but it is nonetheless what passes for the national culture'. He also discusses the ambiguous importance of 'Encounter' for gay audiences, as both a means of camp resistance to the dominant culture (by mocking what seems to be 'quintessentially British', and implicity exclusive), but also (as written by gay playwright Noel Coward), a displaced narrative of 'forbidden love' kept in the closet. Unfashionably, Dyer examines 'Encounter' textually, as if the film was a unified artefact that arrived fully formed out of nowhere. He is not very interested in the production process, the economic pressures on aesthetic choices, or the individual contributions of personnel (with the exception of lead actress, Celia Johnson). More fashionably, he downplays the film's 'auteur' credentials, not considering writer-producer Coward at all. The most brilliant section of the book is an analysis of the opening scene, showing us how, through camera movement and composition, director David Lean economically, even poetically sets up the film's characters and themes. More of this would have been very welcome. Still, this is a marvellous book, full of Dyer's usual generosity, lucidity and circumspection - he relates other points of view or interpretations with great fairness and precision (how very English!), before offering his own - most academics set up other writers just to knock them down. He proves that detached intellectual engagement with this brilliant film does not preclude profound emotional investment.
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DVD ~ Richard Harris
DVD ~ Wendy Hiller
DVD ~ Roger Livesey
DVD ~ Deborah Kerr
DVD ~ Peter Lorre
