Typically recognized for its portrayal of middle-class repression and female depression, the film is also an early eulogy to British empire. The doomed flirtation signals an end to Britain’s love affair with the world, and a rude but necessary return to domesticity. The film is accordingly symptomatic of both the malaise and lingering romance of British imperial memory in the post-war.
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British director David Lean is best known for Lawrence of Arabia. At a glance, his 1945 film Brief Encounter could not be more different. The film depicts a love affair between a married doctor and a suburban housewife. Much of the slim ninety minutes pass in a railway station refreshment room, in the small parish of Milford. A far cry from a three-hour epic of deserts, Arab princes, and men on camelback! Yet both manifest a distinctly British postcolonial melancholia, borrowing a term from Paul Gilroy. In Lawrence of Arabia, the bittersweet nostalgia for high British imperialism needs little clarification. But it is all the more remarkable in A Brief Encounter, released in 1945 when the meaning of a “postcolonial” Britain was still embryonic. Typically recognized for its portrayal of middle-class repression and female depression, the film is also an early eulogy to British empire. The doomed flirtation signals an end to Britain’s love affair with the world, and a rude but necessary return to domesticity. The film is accordingly symptomatic of both the malaise and lingering romance of British imperial memory in the post-war.
Brief Encounter begins with Laura parting from her lover, Alec, for the last time, and returning home in a daze. She narrates her memories of the (unconsummated) affair as if she were confessing them to her husband, Fred. But she never does confess. The film feels both immediate and retrospective, traumatic and unreal, like the non-act of imagined confession might vacate the guilt eating away at her.
Milford is the site of Laura’s affair and a kind of memory-map for Empire. The spaces are both foreign and familiar, referring to a global geography every Brit should know as their own. But the comfortably exotic easily morphs into the hostile and alien. At the theatre the couple watch Flames of Passion, a fictional film-within-a-film featuring colossal elephants, mobs of armed natives, and a scantily clad white woman burning on the pyre. “It was a terrible picture,” remarks Laura, our voice of tasteful retrospective – this crudity is not something to be remembered fondly. Indeed, Flames of Passion might give a glimpse at the kind of imperial movie Lean did not want to make with Lawrence, seventeen years later. When Alec and Laura finally meet in private, at a flat of his friend Stephen’s, Laura’s eye is drawn to the ostentatious Arabian carpet on the wall. It transforms from a suggestive exoticism to a symbol of unwelcomeness when Stephen interrupts the pair and Laura flees the flat. The carpet looms over Alec as Stephen confronts and banishes him. And where might Laura rest but underneath a war memorial? The metal soldiers rise impossibly large above her, armed with bayonet and machine gun. She shelters in their shadow. A police officer strides out to question her, cutting her off from the memorial (though seeming puny in comparison). A woman ought not to smoke in public, let alone so late at night and by herself. Domestic discipline stamps out reveries of imperial grandeur.
What does the “home front” offer Laura? Certainly, a loving husband, and two sweet children. But Fred orders her around, and her son has learned to follow suit. She is suffocated by everything in her small suburban life, above all its overwhelming Britishness: her husband sits on a floral sofa, framed against floral curtains, blundering through Keats and Shakespeare in his daily crossword. Her female friends are gossips and socialites. She is lonely, bored, and without purpose.
Alec is leaving with his family to Africa. It’s one of the first things we learn about him in the film. He is motivated by an idealistic humanitarianism. He is dashing, passionate, boyish, out of place in drippy England. Africa is a place where Dolly – the film’s unwitting villain, whose horrible posh chatter tortures Laura at her lowest – would never be found. “Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away from England and home and all the things l’m used to.” Besides, she has heard the Johannesburg “social life was quite horrid – provincial and very nouveau riche.” Walking with Alec through the botanical gardens, Laura reflects: “l believe that we’d all behave differently if we lived in a sunny climate. Not so withdrawn and shy and difficult.” In short, then, Britain is stuffy, repressed, stratified; Africa is open, free, dangerous, egalitarian.
Things might be different if she were a man. We get a glimpse at this alternate life in Laura’s discussion with Fred of sending their son to the Navy. She worries that the boy might abandon his family – a projection of her own desires and a recognition of the freedom a man might enjoy in the imperial geography. “He’ll see the world, have a wife in every port,” she remarks wistfully. These fantasies of libertine globe-trotting might be hers to seize were she a young man. She imagines the son returning “with a beard and a parrot.” She has, her husband jokes, “rather a Victorian view of the Navy.” Even her cross-dressing fantasies are coloured by imperial anachronism. She is of the wrong sex, but above all, she is born too late.
A break with the imperial romance is tragic but inevitable. The desperate oscillations of the lovers between staying and going; Alex’s mournful diagnosis of the “beginning of the end … not the end of my loving you, but the end of our being together”; his insistence that “a sudden break now, however admirable, would be too cruel” – all this is the language of late empire as high melodrama. Laura wonders if their children – one set British, the other South African – will someday meet, many years from this painful parting. With decolonization on the doorstep, postcolonial melancholia sets in.
Her relationship with her husband likewise takes on new meaning. She is wracked with guilt from her foreign affairs. Her husband, archetype of the British middle class, bankrolls her imperial tryst at the expense of his own reputation. But Fred is not jealous. On the contrary, the film concludes with an affirmation of his infinite generosity. The tragedy of imperial decline promises, perhaps, a reconciliation of Great Britain with herself. “You’ve been a long way away,” he says. “Thank you for coming back to me.” This is a curious vision of British postcoloniality, no doubt. The dominated peoples have no voice of their own. The film’s only “African,” so to speak, is a white British man moving to proto-apartheid Johannesburg. The restoration of domestic harmony implies both retreat from empire and rejection of foreignness. Brief Encounter is a striking glimpse into a conservative British post/colonial imaginary, desperate to hold on yet eager to let go.
Works Cited
Paul Gilroy. Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia University Press, 2004.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
