Plot
The film takes place around the end of 1938. Laura Jesson (Johnson), a suburban housewife in a dull but affectionate marriage, tells her story in the first person while at home with her husband, imagining that she is confessing her affair to him.
Conventional Laura, like most women of her class at that time, goes to a nearby town every Thursday for shopping and to the cinema for a matinée. Returning from one such excursion to Milford, while waiting at the station, she is helped by another passenger to remove a piece of grit from her eye. The passenger is Alec Harvey (Howard), an idealistic doctor who also works one day a week as a consultant at the local hospital. Both are in their thirties, and each is married with two children.
Enjoying each other's company, the two arrange to meet again. They are soon troubled to find their innocent and casual relationship quickly developing into love.
For a while, they meet furtively, constantly fearing chance meetings with friends. After several meetings, they go to a room belonging to a friend and fellow doctor of Alec's, Stephen (Valentine Dyall), but they are interrupted by Stephen's unexpected return. This brings home the fact that a future together is impossible and, not wishing to hurt their families, they agree to part. Alec has been offered a job in Johannesburg, South Africa, where his brother lives.
Their final meeting is at the railway station refreshment room, which we see for the second time, now with the poignant perspective of their story. As they await a sad and final parting, Dolly Messiter, a talkative acquaintance of Laura, invites herself to join them and is soon chattering away, oblivious to the couple's inner misery.
As they realise that they have been robbed of the chance for a final goodbye, Alec's train arrives. With Dolly still chattering, Alec departs with a last look at Laura but without the passionate farewell for which they both long. After shaking Messiter's hand, he lightly squeezes Laura on the shoulder and leaves. Laura waits for a moment, anxiously hoping that Alec will walk back into the refreshment room, but he does not. As the train is heard pulling away, Laura is traumatised, and, hearing an approaching express train, suddenly dashes out on to the platform. The lights of the train flash across her face as she conquers her impulse to commit suicide. She then returns home to her family.
In the final scene of the film, which does not appear in the original Coward play, Laura's bland but kind husband Fred suddenly shows that he has noticed her distress in the past weeks, and takes her in his arms.
Read more about this topic: Brief Encounter
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)