|
David Lean made his debut in the 1940s thanks to the playwright Noel Coward, who provided him with the scripts for his early successes.
In which we Serve (1942)
ecounts, in an almost documentary style, the ordeal of a group of shipwreck survivors adrift at sea, who reflect on their past.
The Happy Breed (1943), from a Noel Coward play (1939), is a family saga set between the two world wars,
tells, in a patriotic tone, the story of England between the two World Wars through the moving experiences of an ordinary family.
Blithe Spirit (1945)
is one of the most entertaining plays of 20th-century English theatre.
Brief Encounter (1945), adapted from Noel Coward's play "Still Life" (1935), is a subtle study of provincial customs and a delicate evocation of poignant emotions, telling the story of an impossible love between a man and a woman, each loyal to their respective spouses.
A station attendant walks into the refreshment tea room of a train station and
chats with the middle-aged waitress who is not in a happy mood. Behind them
a melancholy middle-aged couple (Alec and Laura) is sitting at a table. A friend of the woman,
Dolly,
recognizes her and sits at the table with them for a quick chat. The man, Alec,
a doctor, gets up, says goodbye and walks away to catch his train. Laura is
distressed. As she boards another train with the talkative Dolly, she thinks
of her conversation with the doctor.
Back home, she tends to the children and chats with her husband Fred. But just
the distant whistling of a train is enough to bring tears to her eyes.
Standing in the same room with her husband, she continues her interior
monologue. She would love to ask her husband for advice, but he is the one
who cannot help her, because she fell in love with another man.
A flashback (narrated by her as if she were talking to her husband) shows how
she met Alec by accident for the first time in that very station, while the
same station attendant was bickering with the same waitress. She met him again
and then tried to meet him again on purpose. Eventually they went to the movies
together. They started seeing each other once a week on purpose. Their secret
friendship became less and less innocent. She realized that he too was hiding
their encounters from his wife. They were both incapable of stopping what was
happening between them, and they were both reluctant to call it what it was.
When Laura's son was hurt in an accident, she impulsively decided to reveal
to Fred the existence of Alec, but Fred hardly cared. This motivated Laura
to return to the station, where the encounter with Alec was more enthusiastic
than ever. They went to the lake and hired a boat, after which they finally
confessed to each other that they had fallen in love. For the first time Laura
lied to her husband about something. When a cousin saw them having lunch
at an expensive restaurant, Laura began to feel mortally guilty. So when Alec
tried to invite her to an apartment, she first refused and ran on board the
train. But then got off the train and walked to the apartment. Feeling even
more guilty, she ran away the moment Alec's friend (the owner of the apartment)
arrived. She felt like a criminal. Alec found her at the station's tea room.
Respecting her feelings, Alec informed her that he had decided to move to
South Africa. They spent their last day together and then said goodbye at
the station's tea room. We see the first scene again, as they are melancholy
discussing their case. When Dolly enters, we hear the same voices again,
but this time the camera follows Laura's interior monologue. When Alec leaves
to catch his train, Laura briefly follows him outside for a final goodbye
and for a second she contemplates suicide. Then she walks back in, where
Dolly continues to talk.
The flashback is over. The monologue (in which she was addressing Fred as if
she was talking to him) is over. She is sitting in front of her husband in
their living room. Her husband, noticing her distress, thanks her for coming
back to him: he has always known.
whatever her dream was, it was not a happy one.
In this film, the mastery of flashback technique and the careful depiction of everyday realism stand out, capturing the English middle class in its most characteristic behaviors.
His skills in exploring the psyche of ordinary people and to reconstruct settings with visual finesse allowed him, after his collaboration with Coward ended, to create exemplary adaptations of Dickens.
The intimate drama
The Passionate Friend (1948) tells the story of
a married woman who has one last fling with her childhood sweetheart.
Madeleine (1949) is
a reconstruction of a 19th-century criminal case.
The Victorian comedy Hobsons Choice (1954) is the tale of a cantankerous widower who owns a shoe shop and has three marriageable daughters, to whom he refuses to give even a penny of dowry. The eldest daughter marries one of his employees, competes with him until she tames him, and ultimately gains control of both the house and the shop.
In the Venetian interlude of Summer Madness (1955), Katharine Hepburn plays an older American spinster on vacation who is seduced during a "brief encounter."
From this point on, Lean mainly turned to populist cinema, creating intimate films that elegantly fused social, scenic, historical, heroic, adventurous, and civil themes. His greatest success came with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), a spectacular epic infused with a touch of military satire.
The English colonel is steeped in military code and English officerly pride: he refuses to yield to the barbaric methods of the Japanese commander and continues to enforce discipline among his men, until the Japanese officer relents and grants him authority over the prisoners. The colonel, a prisoner in a Japanese camp in the Malaysian jungle, is forced to oversee the construction of a bridge. In the end, that bridgesymbol of British civilizationbecomes so obsessively important to him that, upon learning of an imminent attack by his compatriots, he warns the enemy. Ultimately, however, he regains his sense of duty and sacrifices himself by triggering the detonator.
The film is a parable about the military code, which ultimately transcends moral reasoning and takes on a life of its own; a stoic English patriotism that is at once exalted and ridiculed. From the start, he is opposed to attempting escapes, because in his view they are impossible (though in reality he is merely afraid of being upstaged), yet it will be one of the escapeesthe cynical, utterly unpatriotic playboywho alerts the troops and secures their liberation. When, after days of torture, he subdues the Japanese officer and gains command over the prisoners, it becomes crucial for him to demonstrate that under his leadership the English soldiers are efficient, and the bridge becomes a symbol of superior English civilization.
The colonels stubborn, proud, and meticulous behavior is all the more absurd because they are prisoners; he builds a bridge superior to what they themselves could have built, simply to prove the English are better, even though in doing so he harms the English.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is a biopic about the
undisciplined British lieutenant sent to Cairo during the Great War to incite the Arabs to revolt against the Turkish Empirea sort of desert-set Western, full of executioners and marauders, massacres, and train assaults. Yet it offers a sharp analysis of the hero, afflicted by a civilizing epic and betrayed by the politicians who will handle his exploits in their own way.
Doctor Zhivago (1966) is an epic historical film based on Pasternak's novel.
Ryan's daughter (1970) is a lively portrait of Irish life, told through the marital quarrels of a mismatched couple who get into so much trouble that they are eventually driven out of the village.
|
