"45 Years"

Courtenay and Rampling play Geoff and Kate Mercer, a childless couple deep into their retirement years, who share a handsome rural home in the picturesque flatlands of Norfolk in eastern England. A week before their 45th wedding anniversary party, Geoff receives a shock letter explaining that the body of Katia, his long-lost German sweetheart, has been found perfectly preserved in a Swiss glacier. After falling to her death in an alpine hiking accident, Katia has been missing for 50 years.

This macabre news unsettles Geoff, who takes up smoking again and begins making shaky plans for a possible trip to Switzerland. But Kate is more profoundly shaken, especially when she discovers Geoff was officially listed as Katia's next of kin. Playing detective, she sifts through her husband's private photo archives, uncovering more revelations from his past which potentially shaped the choices he later made with her. While she maintains a brave face for social obligations and party preparations, Kate is slowly devoured by unspoken jealousy and gnawing doubt.

 

45 Years is based on David Constantine's short story In Another Country, first published in his well reviewed 2005 collection Under The Dam. Haigh retains the basic plot details and character names but expands the action, ditches the World War II context of the Katia character, and makes the elderly protagonists a decade or so younger. Even though Geoff and Kate are clearly beginning to suffer the health problems of later life, Haigh portrays them as emotionally and physically active. A sex scene between the 77-year-old Courtenay and 68-year-old Rampling may end in comic disappointment, but it is still a rare and touching defiance of movie convention.

 

Kate is very much the script's main emotional focus, but Haigh is careful not to make Geoff into a cliched insensitive oaf who tramples over his wife's tender feelings. Both are flawed but sympathetic. Spiced with fragments of back story and vintage jukebox hits from the couple's courtship days, the screen chemistry between Courtenay and Rampling captures the convincing texture of long-term marriage with all its non-verbal communication, unfinished sentences and half-buried tensions. That deep-frozen body in the glacier serves as poetic metaphor as well as literal plot device.

  

Framed by crisp wide shots of misty Norfolk landscapes in washed-out watercolor tones, 45 Years is visually appealing and carefully restrained. That said, many of the ensemble scenes feel like padding, with their stilted dialogue and superfluous secondary characters. Some viewers may also find this very English story a little too tastefully understated, since Haigh ultimately avoids the full tragic darkness that a Bergman or a Michael Haneke film might have tackled. Do not expect blazing emotional fireworks, just finely calibrated performances and deep reserves of inner torment.

Production company: The Bureau
Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James, Dolly Wells
Director, screenwriter: Andrew Haigh
Producer: Tristan Goligher
Cinematographer: Lol Crawl

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Film is an art that plays tricks with time. A movie is a fixed, finite, relatively short experience — a hundred minutes or so in a given viewer’s life — that can span years, even centuries. The phrase “real time,” sometimes applied to movies that match their internal and external chronologies, expresses a wish and a delusion. In reality, as on screen, time compresses, expands, doubles back on itself and even, now and then, appears to stop.

The last shot of “45 Years,” Andrew Haigh’s sensitive and devastating portrait of a long, happy marriage in sudden crisis, is one such frozen moment. Everything is paused, suspended in curious limbo. A wife — I’m treading cautiously to avoid revealing too much — looks at her husband as if seeing him for the first time, as if seized by a sudden and unwelcome new understanding. What will she do with her knowledge? We may think we’ve reached the end of the story, but maybe this is just the beginning.Continue reading the mainWhat, exactly, came before? By the time the final credits appear, in effect stopping the narrative in the middle (which is where all plots really end), it feels as if we have known this couple, Kate and Geoff Mercer, forever. It’s only been about a week (or, in another sense of “really,” just an hour and a half or so), but that has been enough to establish the rhythms of daily routine and longstanding intimacy. Kate (Charlotte Rampling) is a retired schoolteacher. Geoff (Tom Courtenay) was a factory manager. They never had children. Their life — walks with their dog in the countryside near their rambling old house; lunches with friends; tea in the afternoon; books at bedtime — is a quiet celebration of hard-won middle-class comforts.

Mr. Haigh, who at 42 is a few years shy of his movie’s title, shades his picture of the Mercers with subtle nostalgia. Like the couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen in Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” Geoff and Kate are serene survivors of Britain’s postwar transformation, beneficiaries of the collapse of old hierarchies and the expansion of opportunity. Ms. Rampling, 69, and Mr. Courtenay, 78, are themselves both avatars of the ’60s, though her star rose a bit later than his. In “Billy Liar” and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” he established himself as one of the era’s great rebels, a wiry, jumpy young man pushing upward and outward against the constraints of class and circumstance.

It isn’t hard to supply adventurous pasts for Geoff and Kate, who reminisce fondly about the early days of their relationship. But the past intrudes on them in an unexpected and unnerving way. As they are arranging a big anniversary party, a letter arrives from Switzerland. The body of Katya, a former girlfriend of Geoff’s who died in a mountaineering accident while they were traveling together, has been recovered from a glacier, and the authorities believe Geoff is the next of kin.

What is he to make of this news? How should Kate, who met Geoff after Katya’s death, react to it? At first, they reach for comforting truisms: It was a long time ago, and decades of steady marital happiness surely outweigh a few months of tragic romance. But before long, Geoff and Kate find themselves haunted in different ways. Geoff falls into a restless funk. He starts smoking again, and digs up keepsakes and photographs that remind him of the beautiful young woman he sometimes calls “my Katya.” Kate, whose name is an echo of her predecessor’s, wonders how she can be jealous of someone who has been dead for a half-century. That strikes her as completely unreasonable, and yet it’s undeniable that Katya, from beyond the grave, is stealing her husband.

“45 Years” is far from a supernatural melodrama, but Mr. Haigh allows the spookier implications of the story to hover around the edges. Geoff and Kate are rational, practical-minded people. The news about Katya comes into their house like a visitation from another dimension of experience, a reminder of the uncanny, irrational power of memory and desire. Mr. Courtenay, a naturally demonstrative actor, registers a convincing blend of longing, confusion and shame. Ms. Rampling, a stiller, deeper-running pool, conveys emotions so strange and intense that they don’t quite have names.

The specter of the lost lover brings with her the implication of a wholly different life, a subjunctive, shadow existence in which Kate and Geoff were never together. Katya’s return warps and unravels time itself. It bends and buckles, even as it seems, to everyone watching, to pass in the usual way, marked out in hours and calendar pages.

In his previous feature, the wondrous “Weekend,” Mr. Haigh showed how a brief sexual encounter between two young men could contain a lifetime’s worth of feeling. After 48 hours together, the lovers had somehow arrived at a complete and perfect knowledge of one another. “45 years” points its inquiry into the ways of love in the opposite direction, and suggests that even after decades together, two people can remain perfect strangers.