Brief Encounter 1945
Past Lives 2023
Because I’ve had a life-threatening allergy to films about extramarital attraction, Brief Encounter and Past Lives are like immunotherapy for me. They prove that films about this subject can be sensitive, thoughtful, and that they can restrain their cameras from being drunk with lust after the forbidden fling. Tangling with this topic does not always mean, as I had once thought, giving swoony play to these attractions but can also mean interrogating them, analyzing them, and maybe even grieving over them as these two films sometimes do.
David Lean, painter on the big canvases of the cinema, paints pointedly small in Brief Encounter. You could say he is painting the landscape of forlorn hearts here, and you would be right. Did he learn to paint big by first painting small?
The way Lean paints these interior landscapes is all the more impressive because it is not merely visual. The play of shadows and light is here, to be sure, especially on the face of Celia Jonhson’s Laura as she sits by the fireplace and her memory burns with a story that she could or could not share with her husband. Crucially, the landscape is also filled in by what we hear. We hear Rachmaninoff’s concerto as a harbinger of memory, but then we also hear Laura’s voice-over narrating the mountains and valleys of her meetings with Alec and the same mountains and valleys of her own soul.
On a recent first-time watch of Brief Encounter I saw strands that Celine Song ran with when she wove Past Lives. This all makes me want to watch the two films back-to-back.
What would I find? I’m not sure the fine camera of Past Lives surpasses the delicate majesty of Lean’s black-and-white. However, I suspect Past Lives would go the distance as a film with its even more nuanced script and ravishing central performances.
When it comes down to it, my desire to rewatch the two films come from two different places within me. I want to go back to Lean’s film for my head, and I want to go back to Song’s for my heart.
Does this split come from my natural affinity for modern characters and sensibilities? It’s possible it does, but I also feel Past Lives’s willingness to confound any expectations of what will happen between these characters places it outside of time. It seems neither modern nor old-fashioned. It is these characters existing in their world together, perhaps even a world where time has stopped. After all, doesn’t time seem to have stopped when we are in the bar with these three on their final endless night together?*
That’s another thing, isn’t it? Past Lives is the story of three, whereas Brief Encounter, despite some gestures toward the husband character, feels ultimately like the story of two. Two lives is fascinating, but if a film has wrapped itself around three lives it has really done something for the ages.
*Past Lives was in fact shot by Shabier Kirchner on celluloid to create a sense of timelessness. Kirchner said, “The decision to shoot on film really came down to wanting something that felt timeless—we wanted to be able to translate love that felt eternal onto a canvas.” https://www.instagram.com/panavisionofficial/p/Cz_xvcZuV_4/?img_index=1
Speaking of time (spoiler alert), here is what Kirchner says about some choices made during the filming : “We were speaking about the final scene in the film, and I asked Celine a question of what direction should they walk? In a very Celine fashion, she (said) ‘Well, they should walk right to left because that is into the past. And she should drop him off in the past and then walk from left to right back into the future and up the stairs.’ That very small and simple moment in our conversation led and informed the entire language of the film in terms of how we move the camera from left to right.” https://www.camnoir.com/pastlives/
