Landlord had brought two DVDs home. He borrowed them from a colleague and so we set up the laptop, lit a fire int eh fireplace got the dinner on.

While cooking, he kept asking me whether I’d seen Brief Encounters (no) and reminded me that it is considered one of the greatest British films ever made (really?). He said it was very romantic (I never thought you were the romantic type) and we would watch it tonight, cuddled up on the sofa (aaaaw, what a sweetie).

If you’ve not seen it, I won’t spoil the ending but essentially it follows a happily married middle class woman (Laura) who goes to town every Thursday to do some shopping, change her library books and go to the pictures. It’s a bit of ‘me’ time for her. You meet her husband briefly and he seems a rather sweet if predictable chap. Not a bad sort, just a bit dull.

In between all the Rachmaninov, her Thursday ritual includes sitting in the railway cafe until her train arrives and one day she gets some grit in her eye and a stranger (a doctor) removes the grit and she thinks nothing more of it - until they bump into each other the following week. He invites himself to the cinema with her, they chat in the railway cafe afterwards and he insists they see each other again.

The following week she goes to meet him and this innocent Thursday rendez-vous turns into a love affair. She is tortured by the guilt but the passion and excitement is too much. Their love can’t be denied but they are both married (just not to each other).

I watched the film and am sad to report that I didn’t find it in the least bit romantic. It must be the cynic in me but I didn’t trust the dashing young doctor (Alec) one bit. He bunks off work and invites himself the cinema, he insists they see each other, he pressurises her into saying ” I Love You”. In one scene, he takes her to a fine restaurant and as he pours himself another glass of champagne I can’t help but think: You bastard! what about your wife and kids back home?! Do you buy her champagne, too?

I can see what gets the naive Laura so hooked. She’s the archetypal bored housewife and the Thursday affair is a break out of her dreary life. She feels alive again, is the centre of someone’s interest and it’s all so neatly contained in a time and place removed from her everyday existence. The affair is excitement, it’s escapism but the one thing it is not is love.

Throughout the film, each step toward a deeper affair is initated by Alec, and of course for the sake of plot I can see wy this is done -  it preserves Laura’s innocence,  that her character is not to blame and that this ‘just happened’  but unfortunately to my cycnical eye it just looked like Alec does this sort of thing a lot and was only trying to get his leg over. I found him selfish, insensitive and extremely manipulative.

In one scene he tries to lure her to a friend’s flat he’s got the key to it while his friend is out of town. She’s daft enough to go but being an old black and white movie nothing happens, as the out-of-town friend comes home early.

Of course Laura is a decent person and is wracked with guilt. She tries to do the decent thing and being sensible is all she can think of.. She tries to end it but Alex won’t let her. The film is all about this inner battle but frankly what she was feeling was not love, it was infatuation, a craving for feeling desirable - as to Alec, he didn’t love her or he’d have listened to her.  He seemed unaffected by her anguish over the guilt and being so torn - all he wanted was to keep her hooked.

As the film neared its end I remembered Landlord’s words that this was a great romantic classic and so I tried to put my cynicism aside and I found if you sort of squinted and tilted your head to one side, you could sort of pretend that this was love and I managed to squeeze out a little bit of sympathy for the characters in the final scene but really that was only Celia Johnson’s superb acting skills.

You know how in black and white movies the acting is so over-the -top. Each line is delivered in perfect diction, with emphasis on the second or fifth word, with furtive twitches of eyebrows or distant, brooding looks just off camera , but Celia plays a genuine naturalness in her acting that I’ve never seen in a b&w film before.  Her performance was the only thing worth noting in the film. It’s not a romance, it’s a warning. Love played no part in it and by the end of the film I was feeling about as gooey as a lump of granite.

Next film review: Get Carter