Brief Encounter

Todd Haynes has named Brief Encounter as the model for Carol's structure, and the borrowing is the frame itself. Both films open on a conversation in a public place, interrupted by a third person who has no idea what they have walked into; both then tell the story in flashback and return to that same scene at the end, so the audience watches it a second time knowing everything. Carol's tea-room parting is Lean's railway buffet. What Haynes changes is what the constraint is made of. Lean's lovers are stopped by marriage and propriety; Carol's are stopped by a morality clause and a private investigator, and the film refuses Lean's renunciation at the end.

The same film made again in another language: two married people who fall in love, meet in public places, and never act on it, with the restraint carrying the whole weight. What carries across is the method rather than the plot. Both keep the lovers in transit spaces, a railway refreshment room and a noodle stall stairwell. Both use one piece of music as an involuntary signal that the feeling has returned. Both refuse a scene in which anyone says plainly what is happening. Filed MEDIUM: Wong's stated sources are Liu Yichang's novella Intersection and his own childhood Hong Kong, and this is a kinship widely drawn rather than a debt he has claimed.