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The National Theatre did a special Valentines screening of Brief Encounter last night. It was a chilly outdoor showing, projected onto the wall of the Fly Tower, which looks out over the Thames, to an audience sat about in deck chairs, cocooned in blankets and rugs.

I’d never seen it before (although I thought I had), which was probably for the best. Despite our checked tartan blanket the wind was whipping up around our legs, and I think if I’d known the story and not been so keen to sit it out and see how it ended I might have suggested we left shortly after Celia Johnson’s first cigarette.

But despite the cold, it was utterly captivating, and it left me wondering how I’d managed to get this far through life without having seen it before. Like I had with Casablanca. It’s the story of Laura and Alec. He comes into the tea room at the station where she’s waiting for her train. She gets some grit in her eye and he helps to remove it. One chance meeting leads to another and soon they’re having illicit lunches together and trips out to the country, all the while telling their respective partners half-truths about what they did with the day.

But their relationship was doomed from the start. This was 1945, and such behaviour would have been quite shocking. One lie led to another and another until finally something had to be done to draw it to a close. A few weeks of irresponsible happiness had killed all feeling Laura had for her husband, and she was left, by the end of the film, trapped in an unhappy relationship, which had ultimately been torn to pieces by something so incidental as a piece of grit in her eye.

It drew a capacity crowd. The deckchairs were full before we get there, and so we perched on the side of a flower bed, while other lay right in it, using the neat box hedges as pillows. Some others, better-equipped than ourselves, had brought sleeping bags and garden chairs, and they sat there wrapped up tight, snacking on the tea and bath buns being served up to get us in the mood.

The free guide they gave out included a review from The Monthly Film Bulletin of December 1945, which gave it high praise. ‘There have been few better British films than Brief Encounter even at a time when our studios are taking their place in the vanguard of this great contemporary art‘.

Only half of that statement still holds true. British cinema may no longer be in the vanguard of great contemporary art, but that there have been few better films than Brief Encounter is as true today as it was at the end of the War.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 10:11 am and is filed under Journal, London, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.