Brief Encounter was on TV yesterday. This classic 1940′s British movie about unrequited love is one of my favourites and I consider it one of the best non-gay, gay films ever made. This is because, while essentially being a story of a married man and a married woman meeting and falling in love at the wrong time, it’s easy to read it as two men, and it’s based on a play by Noel Coward who was, of course, gay.

Director, Richard Kwietniowski, alludes to this in his 1989 gay short, Flames of Passion, a title that references a movie within the movie that his movie references – you follow?! Kwietniowski went on to make another movie about unrequited love: 1997 release, Love and Death on Long Island, and is now in pre-production with something called No One Gets Off in This Town.

I love the structure of Brief Encounter. The same scene bookends the film, but it’s only at the end we appreciate the emotion and significance behind the action and dialogue. While this conversation between the two central characters seems trivial and throwaway the first time we view it, at the end, it’s one of the most moving scenes in Cinema. And here it is, the final 6 minutes of the film, only spoilt slightly by the ‘happy ending’ tacked on, probably, after studio pressure.