Check Out Brief Encounter For Free This Weekend

Sometimes a movie about a love story isn't all about boy meets girl, boy gets girl. Sometimes it's about man meets woman, they're both married, oh man is this going to be complicated. I love me a classic movie, and this weekend at the International Museum of Art, a heartbreaker of a classic movie will be showcased during their month of love story movies for February.

Brief Encounter is an amazing, sweet, sad, rip-your-heart-out-of-your-chest love story that you probably have never seen. I had seen this movie come up on TCM about a hundred times before I actually watched it one afternoon. It starts out slowly, nothing spectacular, very average people living very average lives, until one afternoon at a train station, the man and woman meet. They're very English so everything is very proper and restrained, no ripping off of clothes and wild, passionate lovemaking that will have you squirming uncomfortably in your seat if you go with someone you don't want to watch passionate lovemaking with.

But I digress.

Brief Encounter is one of those movies that you see and it leaves you breathless at the end. You can't believe what just happened. You can't believe it ended like that. It was such a quiet little movie, so evenly paced, so true-to-life that it could happen today even though it was filmed in 1945. The actors, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, are not movie star glamorous. They look like someone your parents might know, if your parents lived in 1945 London.

Ok, I just read this and it's long. Go see this movie! It's free, there are really well priced concessions so you'll probably end up spending about $20 at the most. It's at the International Museum of Art, 1211 Montana Ave., Saturday, February 9, 2:00 p.m.

Go look at the museum afterward. It's free, too. You'll have a lovely afternoon, I promise.