Rampling and Courtenay deservedly won the Silver Bear at last year's Berlinale for their performances
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It’s Charlotte Rampling what and who you will remember the most long after seeing Andrew Haigh’s seductively understated 45 years, an account of a week in the life of a blissfully happy long-married couple preparing to celebrate their 45th anniversary and who face unforeseen news which could change their lives forever. I don’t mean what they actually do in their lives — walks with the dog, meetings with friends, afternoon tea, book reading — but what goes on inside their hearts and souls. Above all, inside those of Kate, the graceful retired schoolteacher played by Rampling. For it is her shaken expression captured by the camera in the final shot what’s most revealing of uncertain times soon to come.
Tom Courtenay who plays Geoff, a retired factory manager, is as convincing as Rampling is, and in a sense he carries on his shoulders a more difficult role — Kate, as British as she may be, still conveys a certain degree of what she feels, whereas Geoff is ever elusive, apparently naïve to the commotion that an unpredicted blast from the past brings to the meaning of their everlasting love. More than deservedly enough, both actors won the Silver Bear for Best Actress and Best Actor al last year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Kate and Geoff are a well-learned, middle-class couple who’ve been together for — yes — 45 years. Some people can actually do that and even be happy — and I’m not being sarcastic at all. They’ve had their ups and downs just like any couple and it’s not like they stem that sort of glossy, manufactured happiness typical of a US couple from the ‘50s. You can sense their life together is real and that they’ve worked hard to earn what they have. They don’t have any children — and this will later on in the plot prove to be no small detail.
On a given afternoon, their pleasurable present together is invaded by shocking news in the shape of a letter from Switzerland. The dead body of Katya, a former girlfriend of Geoff who had died in a mountaineering accident while they were on a trip together 50 years ago, has been found and recovered from a glacier, almost intact, wearing the same clothes and all. The authorities in charge contacted Geoff for they believe he is the next of kin.
You can imagine all the sorts of questions that may arise from such a situation. Now try to imagine how this couple will try to answer them — whenever possible, that is. Could Kate possibly remain indifferent to knowing more about Katya? For her sake or for the couple’s, should she? What place did Katya actually have in Geoff’s life? She knows about her because he’d told she was his girlfriend and he’d told her about the accident when they met — yet never in detail. Because, upon closer look, what Katya meant to Geoff is to affect what Kate has meant to him as well. Consider it from Kate’s perspective.
The past is never frozen, and though the metaphor of the body rescued from the iceberg could sound too blunt, it actually isn’t. For writer and director Haigh, who adapted David Constantine’s short story In Another Country for 45 years, never makes an issue of it in a melodramatic way. He simply states his very acute emotional gaze upon what this triggers in the couple in a matter of fact manner and places. He could have, of course, resorted to melodrama and that wouldn’t have been necessarily wrong — we all love a good old tearjerker. But I find that the material the filmmaker is dealing with here is better explored in the vein of a fine, intimate drama that won’t tell viewers that much about what happens, once again, inside stirring hearts and afflicted souls.
There’s a particularly shattering scene. Kate has managed to get a hold of a box of old slides and by herself starts viewing them, until she reaches one that shows something different from the rest. I mean the scenario is the same, the composition is basically the same, the lighting is the same; and yet there’s one crucial difference. When Kate realizes what she’s actually seeing, time freezes. It’s like when you see that one detail in the big picture and then the big picture can’t ever be the same. Ever.
Haigh is relatively well known for Weekend, the enticing story of a sexual encounter between two young gay men which ends up being more than just sex. Though slightly overrated, Weekend is nonetheless a mastery of subtlety, minor gestures and emotional honesty. In my view, with 45 years Haigh has outdone himself into a work of a deeper resonance and far more nuances. This is the type of movie that stays with you for years to come.
Production otes
45 years (UK, 2015) Written and directed by Andrew Haigh. With Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James, Dolly Wells. Cinematographer: Lol Crawley. Editor: Jonathan Alberts. Produced by The Bureau, Tristan Goligher. Running time: 93 minutes.
