Film

Intermezzo: A Love Story

Name: Intermezzo: A Love Story
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 1939
Cast: Leslie Howard, Ingrid Bergman, Edna Best, Ann E. Todd, Douglas Scott

A Swedish concert violinist abandons his family for his daughter's piano teacher, whisking her away on a continental tour. Bergman's English-language debut, this is a lush romantic melodrama where beauty and desire collide with domestic duty. It's intimate, morally complex, and utterly beholden to the classical music it celebrates.

TMDb rating

3.4

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you respond to quiet, adult romances where the music does most of the talking and the feelings are shown through glances and silences rather than speeches.

Skip it if you want a brisk plot or a clear moral stance, since the film lingers on longing and its pace stays unhurried for most of its seventy minutes.

What it asks of you: Patience with restraint: it is short, slow in its rhythms, and asks you to read faces and sit with awkward, tender moments rather than follow a lot of incident.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Rebecca1940

Hitchcock's obsessive masterpiece about a woman shadowed by her husband's first wife. Like Intermezzo, it examines how passion and duty war within marriage, but trades violins for gothic mansions and psychological dread.

But The pacing feels glacial by modern standards, and the heroine's passivity—acceptable in 1940—now reads as dated.

Letter from an Unknown Woman1948

A woman writes to a man about their love affair he's forgotten. Max Ophüls crafts the same melancholy music as Intermezzo—the sweetness of forbidden romance soured by the wreckage it leaves behind.

But It's achingly slow and relies entirely on voiceover narration. Watching someone describe heartbreak isn't everyone's idea of drama.

The Affair2014

A marriage breaks under the weight of infidelity. This BBC/Showtime series earns emotional complexity through restraint, finding the same ache Intermezzo discovers: that loving two people is less romantic than tragic.

But It's brutally unglamorous. There are no sweeping violins, only disappointment and resentment and the slow realization that passion was never enough.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Intermezzo: A Love Story

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Emerald Forest1985

Intermezzo is a direct sound-era reimagining of this same story, but seeing the original shows how the addition of dialogue and music fundamentally changes the register.

A silent Danish film about a conductor and a woman who upend each other's lives. It's the template Intermezzo remade in 1939—same country, same structure, same belief that art and passion are inseparable from catastrophe.

But It's silent. The complete absence of dialogue and recorded music means the emotional weight falls entirely on performance and image.

Now, Voyager1942

Bette Davis as a woman transformed by love for a married man. It shares Intermezzo's belief that romantic escape can remake you entirely—and its quiet heartbreak when reality reasserts itself.

But The sentiment is thick as caramel, and the ending may feel like it's having it both ways morally.

A Place in the Sun1951

Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in a tragic love story where passion blinds a man to everything else. The visual beauty matches Intermezzo's romanticism, but the moral weight is much heavier.

But It's almost unbearably heavy. This isn't about the thrill of infidelity; it's about how desire can destroy lives, including your own.

Brief Encounter1945

Two married strangers fall in love in stolen moments between train journeys. Coward and Lean capture the exact temperature of Intermezzo—passionate, guilty, and ultimately resigned to duty.

But The restraint is extreme. If you want fireworks, you'll find only quiet conversations in railway cafés and the ache of what cannot be.

The Bridges of Madison County1995

Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood as strangers who fall for each other over four days. It's Intermezzo modernized—how a few days of perfect love can haunt a lifetime of ordinary marriage.

But The nostalgia is heavy-handed, and the film sometimes mistakes sentiment for depth.

Daisy Miller1974

Bogdanovich's adaptation of Henry James explores how romantic freedom scandalizes society. Like Intermezzo, it's interested in what happens when passion collides with social expectation.

But The constraints that drive the story may feel quaint and hard to take seriously now.

Black Narcissus1947

Both films trust visual and musical beauty to express emotions the characters can barely speak. Both suggest that aesthetic perfection and emotional stability cannot coexist.

Powell and Pressburger's ravishing Technicolor nightmare about repressed desire in a convent. Like Intermezzo, it treats beauty as dangerous—a seduction that leads away from duty and into chaos. The cinematography alone is a kind of music.

But The psychological intensity is relentless. This isn't pretty melancholy; it's gorgeous horror about what happens when passion breaks containment.

Stalker1979

Both films treat desire as a form of pilgrimage—the convinced belief that if we could only reach that other place, that other person, we would be remade. Both movies quietly devastate that fantasy.

Tarkovsky's three-hour meditation on desire and the pursuit of transcendence. It asks the same question as Intermezzo: what are we willing to abandon to reach something we believe is perfect? The pacing is glacial, the payoff invisible, but the ache is real.

But It moves like a glacier. There is almost no plot, almost no dialogue, and what happens at the end may not feel like an ending at all. Most viewers find it beautiful torture.