The heartbreaking beauty of "Brief Encounter"

by Cláudio Alves

Ever since I listened to Robert Altman's commentary track on the Gosford Park DVD, I've bristled at the idea that someone needs to be a certain age to enjoy a film. In that bonus feature, Altman mentions that Gosford Park has nothing to offer to fourteen-year-old boys, and they shouldn't get to watch it. As a fourteen-year-old boy for whom Gosford Park was a favorite, I felt personally attacked. A bit more than a decade later, I've grown less annoyed at such blanket statements about age and movie appreciation. As it turns out, there are films that can gain something when the audience seeing them is more mature. You may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with Brief Encounter or our 1946 celebration? Apologies for my long-windedness.

I'm trying to introduce a personal realization I had. While I might have loved Brief Encounter when I was a teen, I knew not of its power. Now, I think it's one of the best and most devastating films ever made…

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Showbiz History: Casablanca, The King's Speech, and "We Found Love"

5 random things that happened on this day in showbiz history

1937 Nothing Sacred, one of the great screwball comedies of the 30s (but there are so many of them, he said with glee) opens in theaters after its NYC premiere the previous day. It was a personal favourite of Carole Lombard so in addition to being a genius actress, she had good taste in her own work. 

1942 Casablanca premieres in NYC. It has one of the weirdest Oscar timetables ever for a Best Picture winner...

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Distant Relatives: Brief Encounter and Once

Robert here w/ the secone season finale of Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.

Hollywood has a pretty un-nuanced idea of infidelity. Whether cheating is bad usually depends on whether or not it's our protagnist who's doing it. If they are, then their current spouse is probably evil or terrible or unsympathetic and totally worth cheating on especially when the lover in question is most likely a soulmate of some sort to our protagonist. The details may differ but the situation is always perfect for drama. What our two films this week, which are tellingly not from Hollywood but across the pond, have in common is that both are more interested in the subtleties of infidelity than the overdramatics.
 
One place where our films differ is in the genders of our heroes. Brief Encounter is the story of Laura, a British houswife with an unextraordinary existence who meets a charming doctor named Alec Harvey and slowly begins to fall for him as he does for her. Once follows a pretty typical street musician (unnamed in the film, credited as "Guy") who dreams of something greater and begins to collaborate with and develop feelings for an immigrant girl (credited only as "Girl") and she for him. But despite this gender difference between the two films, they are vastly similar.

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