Brief Encounter

Director: David Lean

1945 / 87min / 35mm

Lean’s simple, tender, and terribly emotionally direct film, featuring never-better Noël Coward dialogue and a Rachmaninoff theme that grows insuperably sad with repetition, follows an affair between a middle-class couple (Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard) who happen to be inconveniently married to other people, their mutual love and mutual agony increasing over the course of seven meetings and departures that begin with a chance in a railway station buffet. One of the great screen romances, full stop.

“The trains are mercilessly exact in Brief Encounter—there’s only three minutes between the departures of the trains that take Laura and Alec away from each other, and they’re never late.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue

35mm print provided courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive.

Distributor: AGFA

Introduction by Genevieve Yue on Saturday, September 5th

Part of Trains: Local Routes