General comment


What speaks volumes is that after the passage of sixty-five years, a black and white "little" picture should incite as many and as passionately stated views. What emerges from the numerous ripostes are the many filters art must pass through in each observer. Some of the differences in the perspectives I have read appear to me to be generational. I was two years old when this motion picture was released. Mores do not change overnight, so I understand both the way things were and how they became. In discussing "Brief Encounter," one can argue for all sorts of fine points of social constraints, homosexual tensions, and eroticism in Trevor Howard’s grip on Celia Johnson’s shoulder. I saw none of these; perhaps because I saw two people who became caught up in a state of affairs as old as humanity itself. It is just this timelessness of their dilemma which makes this movie as perduring as it is. And make no mistake that their tension is owed to quaint and Victorian conditioning. The facts are quite well in on the dissolutive effects of broken homes on the greater society. There was more at risk in these two people running off into a pretty sunset than obsolescent mores. There were children and spouses and perhaps extended families. At work in these two intelligent and sensitive souls was the impossiblity of reconciling their feelings for each other with the deadly harm to others which would come of them. "Brief Encounter" remains a powerful drama after more than half a century because it exerts a tension upon any viewer of any time who has a fair amount of circumspection. An amoral observer is doomed to miss the full impact of this immensely wonderful achievement.

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Very well said!

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The last sentence of the OP puts it best.

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I have always been intrigued by the idea that there ought to have been a sequel to this film, set many years later.


Perhaps there even was one that I am unaware of.

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I said the same thing to my wife after we'd just watched the DVD for about the 3rd time, and she pressed me to say how the story would go, and then I realised I really didn't know.

I suppose why I originally thought it was that question Laura posed during the goodbye scene "will we ever see each other again...?"
"I don't know....probably not for many years..."
"The children will be grown up...I wonder if they will ever meet each other..."
etc.

Lots of what ifs.

I sometimes wonder what would have become of them during the war....

Alec would certainly have become an army doctor. He might have come home, or served in South Africa.

Fred was probably too old to be called up for active service, but might have got some commissioned staff post, but if not, would certainly have been in the Home Guard.

Laura would have joined the WVS or whatever it was called, and served tea and sandwiches to the troops on Milford Junction station. She might have palled up with Myrtle! "I'm sure I don't know to what you are referring!".


Mary Norton's husband probably would be called up, serve the whole war abroad, and Mary would have serial affairs with dashing army officers, preferably army doctors...

"Oh, Doctor Harvey...don't you remember me? Mary Norton. We met all those years ago in the lobby of the Royal...you were lunching Laura...."

"Laura?.....oh....[embarassed laugh]....ah yes, er, Laura....
....Look, do you fancy going to the pictures? You see I accidentally killed two patients this morning, and the sergeant-matron is awfully cross with me and I daren't go back..."

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The recent movie Take this Waltz with Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen is kind of a spiritual sequel I always tought.
In heaven everything is fine

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