David Lean

You are currently browsing articles tagged David Lean.

Classic DVD: Brief Encounter (1945)

October 3, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard look longingly at one another. Noel Coward adapted the screenplay from his one-act 1936 stage drama, "Still Life."

One of film’s most beautiful and bittersweet romances, Brief Encounter is an adaptation of a Noel Coward stage play about the unconsummated affair between a married doctor and a bored housewife, both of whom feel an indescribable lack in their lives. A taut film by David Lean with none of the director’s late-career trademark sweep, this drama proves you don’t have to go very far to travel great distances.

Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), a suburban British housewife with a dependable husband and two handsome children, has a chance meeting with married doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) in a railroad tea shop. After another chance meeting, they begin to realize that they fill an emotional void in each other’s life, one that they had only suspected existed before they met. The couple spends several Thursdays together, enjoying lunch, seeing movies and running through the shadowy rail station to catch their trains so that their spouses won’t suspect their dalliance. But the warm glow of their “affair” soon turns dark. Down deep they realize that it’s not only their trains–but their lives–that are heading in opposite directions.

Lean is better known for his epics about great men trying to conquer the world, most notably Lawrence of Arabia. But if Brief Encounter doesn’t have T.E. Lawrence raging against every grain of sand in the desert, it has has a pair of mere mortals who rage just the same and their failure to change their own little worlds feels no less shattering. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

  • To learn about the current Broadway stage production of Brief Encounter, read the review by my former colleague, the excellent New York Post theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli.

More Film Posts:

Tags: , , , ,

New DVD: No Impact Man: The Documentary

February 5, 2010 in Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Beautiful Isabella checks out a ripe gourd with dad.

Stunt journalism didn’t always have a bad name, not when George Plimpton was trying to quarterback an NFL team or become an extra in a David Lean epic. But over the last decade it’s become an increasingly high-concept field concerned more with sales pitches than truly interesting experiences.

Manhattan writer Colin Beavan entered this dubious landscape when he decided to turn a year-long experiment in extreme eco-consciousness into a blog, a book and ultimately this movie (directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein). Beaven, wife Michelle Conlin (a Businessweek journalist) and their two-year-old daughter spent a year without TV, motorized transportation, electricity, air conditioning, elevators and many other modern conveniences that damage the environment. Beaven gets his book deal and plenty of attention (much of it negative), but at least in the film version the focus isn’t on being green but on the dynamics of his marriage.

Beavan is keenly aware what is happening when he tells his wife he thinks discussing their private lives on camera will turn the film into a reality-show spectacle. But spectacle is all they really have. As the initially reluctant Conlin begins to warm to the austerity of her passive-aggressive husband’s scheme, you have to wonder if it’s marital love driving her or the Stockholm syndrome.

Beavan and Conlin aren’t bad people who should be made sport of because they went without toilet paper for awhile. But it’s difficult to take much of this carefully calibrated publicity stunt very seriously.

Tags: , , , , , ,