BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945) * Does music have a soul? Good music, great music, all music, any music? It touches our own souls, certainly, and it feels a big speciocentric not to at least offer the question. If it does, we collectively owe Rachmaninoff's Second a lengthy, and impossible, apology. Of course Eric Carmen's '70s smash pop song lacked the elegance and sophistication of the passage it lifted, but it only exaggerated a bit of schmaltz that was at least already there as a trace element. To tie that piece of music to a film like this is aesthetically criminal. That time, these people...I can barely recognize the species. Dull, unattractive, unbearable people uttering forth in dialogues of the most unbearable nonsense and laying claim to it as a reflection of their deepest feelings...is there anything possible about it? Was the mere possibility of married people having an affair such the currency of intrigue that people, entire rooms of people, would sit through such as this? And be entertained? Apparently. David Lean has some cool train and smoke shots, but it's never anywhere near enough. Wow. It really does make you feel better about the Corporatist State in the Age of Advanced Capitalism. A certain sort of desperation has been removed. I'm not going to say "thank you" anyway though, but it's a particularly weak strain I would never have suffered from.
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