Review: Brief Encounter followed by Briefest Encounter and a Q&A with filmmakers Joanna Crosse and Luke Taylor – Duke of York Picturehouse, Brighton
Saturday October 17, 2026
As part of the celebration of Brief Encounter’s 80th anniversary, the film has been rereleased giving cinema goers a rare chance to experience David Lean’s romantic classic on the big screen.
Watching the film is like opening a time capsule, not just revealing the clothes, accents and lifestyle of 1940s middle-class England, but also the cultural expectations surrounding women, marriage and duty.
Throughout the film, Celia Johnson’s Laura is increasingly on edge as her initially innocent Thursday afternoon meet-ups with Trevor Howard’s Alec lead to a full-blown love affair.
This very ‘proper’ woman soon finds herself lying to her husband and friends in order to protect the relationship.
Trevor Howard’s Alec (a man whose upper lip is so stiff it only moves to curl itself over another cigarette) remains relatively untroubled by the emotional burden of their affair.
He is carefree and playful during the affair, messing about in boats and initiating risky kisses in railway tunnels.
The weight of their affair, at times, pushes Laura to the brink of insanity, with outbursts of maniacal laughter and an abandoned suicide attempt. Alec, however, doesn’t address the morality of their relationship until confronted by an angry colleague who realises his married friend is up to no good.
The lovers exist in their own intense world, in contrast to the carefree existence of the film’s supporting characters. The delightful sub-plot concerning Albert and Myrtle’s (Stanley Holloway’s ticket inspector and Joyce Carey’s cafe owner) love story is one unencumbered by marriage and a sense of duty. They have a riot sharing cheeky banter and it is a romance which, one suspects, would have a far greater chance at longevity than Laura and Alec’s passionate fling. The less dramatic love story is, perhaps, the more convincing.
The performances remain mesmerising. Celia Johnson’s bored middle-class housewife is quick-witted and steely when lying to her friends, whilst panic-stricken and appalled during domestic scenes with her husband and children. Yet her self-disgust is never enough for her to abandon this dangerous, thrilling, episode. Is it Alec who has captured her heart (as she says herself, they barely know each other) or the excitement and independence it brings to her otherwise conventional existence?
Trevor Howard’s upright Alec slowly evolves from the jolly doctor to the dashing romantic lead, full of intent and barely-controlled passion. We see very little of his interior life but his polite dealings with the chatterbox, who gatecrashes the couple’s final goodbye, are the well-polished actions of a man very used to doing the ‘proper’ thing, in public at least.
Laura and Alec’s romance ends with heartbreak as duty forces the lovers apart. Their affair is spared any reallife messiness, unlike the real life relationship explored in the accompanying documentary Briefest Encounter.
Joanna Crosse, with fellow filmmaker Luke Taylor, presents the story of an illicit relationship between her grandparents, married actor Cyril Raymond (who played Fred Jessun in Brief Encounter) and Janet Morrison.
The couple met while performing on Broadway in 1930 and, on returning to England, Janet discovered she was pregnant with Joanne’s father, Nicholas.
It is uncertain whether Cyril knew anything of the boy’s existence and Joanne is convinced her grandfather would have done the ‘right’ thing if he had known. The possibility he may have heard of the child through London’s theatrical ‘grapevine’ isn’t explored.
The child’s life took a twist when he was given up for adoption when he was four years old, Janet struggled to find acting work as a single mother and couldn’t support the boy.
In a heartbreaking detail, we learn that Nicholas, a keen actor himself, once went to see a play starring Cyril, unwittingly praising the man with no inkling that it was his father.
This film is very much Joanna’s love letter to her family past and present, her three children all contributed to the production.
It is a complicated family story which didn’t delve as deeply as it might have. Some aspects remain frustratingly unclear, always a risk when relying on archives to tell the stories of people long dead, but some lingering questions were resolved during the useful Q&A session.
While Brief Encounter’s love affair remains a neatly contained time capsule, Briefest Encounter reveals the heartbreaking realities and repercussions of forbidden love during a time when social duty was more important than the happiness of the individual.
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