So terribly heppy

[white_hart]

The current programme on Radio 4 (which appears to be about optimism and the reverse) just featured a film historian who appeared to think that the ending of Brief Encounter was utterly downbeat.

Personally, I have always thought that if she'd run off with Trevor Howard they'd only have ended up bickering after six months and hating the sight of each other after a year, and that going back to the kind if slightly dull husband was the right decision. This probably says a lot about me. And, indeed, about the film historian who clearly felt she should have run off with Trevor Howard.

Comments

[lilliburlero]

Oh, what a bloody awful misreading. The ending isn't a victory for repression, but for trust and patience and kindness: Fred knows what's been going on, if not the detail, but he knows that this is a thing that Laura has to work through for herself. It's subversive of patriarchal ideas in a way that her running off with Alec could never be: Fred recognises the contingency of relationships, that they are existential by nature, that Laura isn't his possession but his partner and allows her the space to make a free choice. And she makes the right one: Alec is oddly sexually compelling, but he has none of Fred's largeness of heart and spirit; I can see him easily becoming demanding and possessive; he doesn't, as Fred shrewdly guesses, actually make Laura happy, only excited. I have Feelings about Fred.

[white_hart]

Apparently some universities (can't remember which, I think one of the London ones) will give Readerships in film history to *anyone*.

I think maybe people are misled because it has the reputation of being terribly romantic, whereas actually it's quite anti-romantic; in the end the message is that it's better to work at what you have than follow a wild dream.

[clanwilliam]

Thinking about it, is Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea a fanfic of what might have happened?

I was lucky enough to see the Penelope Wilton production as part of my compulsory course on my Erasmus exchange in 1992-3.

[white_hart]

It could very well be!

[callmemadam]

Oh, that film historian is an idiot who understands *nothing*!

[nineveh_uk]

I'm going to contest that Brief Encounter has a specifically happy ending; it certainly has a much better ending than if Laura had run off with Trevor Howard, who is clearly a louse*, but the possibility for a long-term life of quiet desperation with Fred is still there. There's nothing wrong with Fred, he's clearly a perfectly pleasant man who ultimately loves and trusts his wife, but though Laura has learned through the affair what isn't a solution to not being very heppy, the question of what to do instead about the factors that lead her to it is shelved. Though if there is about to be a war no doubt she will find things are going to change anyway!

*I saw a reading of the original play script with Harriet Walter and Alec Jennings, which gave a strong impression that Laura was simply the latest in a string of women that he had pulled this schtick on.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Do you think Ilsa should have stayed with Rick or got on the plane?

[white_hart]

Got on the plane. Though it helps that Rick/Louis is definitely my OTP.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

:-)

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

I like the Victoria Wood version where she runs off with the interrupting friend....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajC4Az4wscc

[white_hart]

Yes, that is one of my favourites of hers.