Brief Encounter by Richard Dyer

Author:Richard Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: British Film Institute

Held by his gaze, yet not wanting to be held …

There is also at least one – telling – moment when I do feel that Johnson strikes a false note. When Alec is going on about his ‘special pigeon’, her face takes on a dopey expression. At first, this expresses Laura’s ignorance of medicine but then, imperceptibly, it becomes her enchantment with him as he warms to his subject. Perhaps her dopeyness is meant straight and it feels unconvincing just because it is bad acting, but the unconvincingness is itself suggestive. Laura so obviously is intelligent, even if she doesn’t know medical terminology; Alec is so obviously delighted to perform to this subservient female audience – isn’t it intolerable that Laura should so abase herself? It’s not that she might not put on such an expression, but that it is precisely ‘put on’. The unconvincingness speaks of the lengths women have to go to please men.

Many of the inflections that I am suggesting can be read into Celia Johnson’s seemingly effortless performance also derive from a most significant fact we know about Laura’s cultural life: she reads. She always has a book on the go in the station or train; changing her library book is, as she tells Alec, part of her regular Milford pattern. This reading habit suggests the way in which she inhabits, if only in the privacy of reading, a particular set of ways of thinking and feeling, a particular discourse; many who saw the film could read Laura’s situation through this discourse, make it (and especially Johnson’s performance) speak what Laura’s confession cannot.

Laura gets her books from Boots, not the public library, and she is so identified with it that Miss Lewis, the librarian, not only treats her as a favoured customer but is well enough established in her life to be used as an excuse when explaining to Fred why she was home late. This suggests a penchant for a particular kind of middlebrow fiction aimed at middle-class women. The cost of borrowing books at Boots placed it between highbrow and lower-class patterns of consumption, and three-quarters of its customers were women.13 Laura’s reading places her within a circuit of readers and writers who, as Nicola Beauman puts it, ‘were linked by their mutual “pre-assumptions”; they spoke the same language, were interested in the same kind of things, led the same kind of lives’.14

The main thing we know more specifically of Laura’s taste is her delight that Miss Lewis has saved the new Kate O’Brien for her. O’Brien’s novels are set either in her native Ireland or in continental Europe, and often in the past. We might put this together with Fred saying that Laura is ‘a poetry addict’ and her recognition of Keats (and hence a certain notion of the poetic), as well as her selection of Rachmaninov and her fantasies of Paris and palm trees, to suggest an essentially romantic discourse. Certainly, this is a component of Laura’s cultural framework and an important

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