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Brief Encounter, The West Yorkshire Playhouse

Noël Coward’s play Still Life (1936) formed the basis of the wonderfully restrained (or rather dry, depending on your sympathies) 1945 film Brief Encounter.

The film tells the story of Laura Jesson, a terribly middle-class, well-to-do sort of housewife who takes the train at Milford Junction to do a few chores. One day she meets the urbane, well-to-do sort of doctor, Alec Harvey. An impossible affair flourishes and dies in the anonymous privacy of the station café.

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as housewife and doctor were delightfully repressed in the film, their furtive affair played out more in silences than in spoken words. And if we’re more used to seeing stage remade for screen, as an example of the opposite Brief Encounter seems a tough proposition.

But here the Kneehigh Theatre has done everything opposite.

As if a reaction to the monochrome movie, the play is full of colour, music and - shock horror - comedy. The stiff upper lip has curled into a knowing smirk. At times, the denizens of the cafe come perilously close to vaudevillian caricature, but the blossoming romance at the centre is wisely protected, retaining its naïveté.

The principal criticism must be that this stage Brief Encounter is rather uneven. When the wider focus of the first half - on character sketches in the station cafe - narrows significantly in the second, the play loses much of its rhythm and energy despite occasional recorse to scenes of light relief.

Nevertheless, the transformation from film to stage is successful. Even then the play does not entirely reject the overtures of cinema. Indeed, aspects of film are celebrated with film sequences projected directly onto the action and the action is choreographed in extraordinary detail.

• Director: Charles Vidor
• United States, 1946
• 

Despite being one of noir’s unlikelier icons, Rita Hayworth seems to have cornered the market in breezy gals with something to hide and in Gilda she does a roaring trade.

For this is indeed a movie of contrasts: it’s a dark, claustrophobic tale played out in a lavish Buenos Aires gambling joint; it’s about the intrigue of secretive Europeans and postwar paranoia in a wide open region that never saw battle. And into this twitchy scene - in which the gamblers watch the joint, the joint watches the monopoly cranks and the police watch everyone - steps all-American Hayworth who, whilst hiding a troubled past, sparkles like a firework that sets the whole thing alight.

If there’s one anomaly, it’s the anti-noir happy ending, in which Glenn Ford’s downbeat Johnny Farrell skips off into the sunset with a suddenly unfettered Gilda. Yet it is just about forgivable, since without their mutual past and their mutual desire, the central tension of the plot - built as it is around these two contrasting characters - could never be so convincing.

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Spain, 1991
• 

The early 90s represent a busy, transitionary period for Almodóvar. And during that period, he takes on multiple muses having apparently fallen out with Carmen Maura. His two key players are Marisa Paredes and the delectable Victoria Abril, both of whom spring up here to lead this oddball of a movie.

Abril is a career-driven newsreader whose errant actress mother (Paredes) is back in town after years away. Abril has married an older man, who happens to be an old flame of Paredes. Classic Almodóvar, really.

And the films of his transitionary period can be a bit awkward - frivolity rubs up against more serious content in a typical riot of colour. Scenes between mother and daughter are superbly acted and these tend to cover up for other, weaker or more implausable moments.

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Spain, 1995
• 

You get the very distinct sense when watching La Flor that Almodóvar is onto something. And so the maturity and virtuosity of his output has increased with each film ever since.

As a writer of great female parts, he’s blessed here with a strong performance from Marisa Paredes who as the protagonista Leo (and her nom de plume Amanda Gris) carries the story almost single-handedly.

Leo’s neurotic approach to love is a little hard to empathise with for this stoical anglosajón, but the film’s luminosity hints overtly at the great things to come. Indeed literally, for the plot of one of Gris’ trash novels would later become Volver.

• Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
• Italy, 2000
• 

It’s tempting to think of Malèna as a shrink-wrapped, ultra-compact, bitesize companion piece to Tornatore’s meandering, elegiac ode to movies Cinema Paradiso. But while both pictures feature protagonists still in the grip of childhood, what drives young Renato here is something less innocent and more erotic. For what’s barely hinted at in the snipped reels of Salvatore’s silver screen is the very epicentre of this great quaking story of an iconic siren.

The siren in question is Malèna Scordia, admirably filled with equal parts mystic and sympathetic by Monica Bellucci, for whom this role seems especially fitting. Yet the contrast between the leading lady of hormonal Renato’s nocturnal wanderings and the reality of a troubled, vulnerable woman struggling with widowhood and wartime couldn’t be greater. It’s through this counterbalance that the movie’s tone turns bittersweet and mines a rich seam of dramatic gold.

For those of us who hold fond memories of Paradiso, Malèna comes off a bit rushed. It’s almost as if Tornatore seems worried about getting away with his usual languid pacing. Nevertheless, everything’s memorably and confidently photographed and even the camera’s love affair with Bellucci doesn’t stop the film from hitting the right emotional notes.