Movie. Brief Encounter, 1945.

Posted by T on September 15, 2006
By Title, Movies

A Noel Coward play.

This is the original chick-flick; and a chick-flick in its most evil incarnation.

Married woman with successful but boring husband meets boyish and romantic doctor in train station.

They meet again…and again.

It is 1945, so nothing actually happens (though it comes shockingly close). But she wants it to; sort of; well, not really; but maybe; yes; no; well if you really love me.

The writing pours it on with things chicks love:

  • The Man with an exuberant exposition of his calling — “you’re just a boy!”
  • Man competently helps Woman (he gets the speck out of her eye).
  • He confesses that something irrational has happened; then demands that she admit to the same.
  • He wins her over by a gush of words.
  • She gets to “surrender”– several times– but yet always gets to qualify it by her inner “reluctance.”

Noel Coward eventually came out of the closet as a homosexual. Weininger was also homosexual, who had explained the theory of the masculine as “interpreting the henids” of the feminine. There is some primal truth to this theory. But in the hands of a homosexual, it becomes perverse. There is too much insight into both sides of the divide, but with a twist: or should I say, twisted.

For purely historical and sociological reasons, some may want to view this.

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