Thanks to global warming a glacier melts, exposing a body perfectly preserved after five decades. That’s the first big secret in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years.
It’s also the perfect metaphor for many tense revelations to follow: the week leading up to a 45th anniversary party proceeds at a glacial pace while a steady drip, drip of fresh information erodes a seemingly bedrock marriage.
After Geoff (Tom Courtenay) receives a letter telling him that his former lover’s body has been recovered in the Swiss Alps, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) does what any self-respecting Englishwoman would do: she puts the kettle on. The couple leads a quiet life in the Norfolk countryside, listening to the radio, reading and walking the dog.
Geoff’s health has been inconsistent; it’s why they never celebrated their 40th anniversary. Now he’s ever more distracted. At first Kate welcomes new information about her husband’s first love, but soon his preoccupation with her grates on Kate’s nerves: “I can hardly be cross at something that happened before we existed,” she says, “but still.” Â
There are small musings (why didn’t they take more photographs?) and big questions (why didn’t they have children?). That fissure, that “narrow crack in the rock” that claimed the life of Geoff’s old love, is exactly what is happening to their supposedly rock-solid marriage. Geoff starts smoking again and making nighttime trips to a stash of memories in the attic. Did Kate never think to snoop before, or was she worried about what she might find? Perhaps telling each other everything is overrated after all.
As the days until Saturday’s party count down, the mood shifts from curiosity about the past, to annoyance with its persistence, to fear that the past may have torn away what future was left.
“It’s like she’s been standing in the corner of the room all this time,” observes Kate of the woman before her.
Director Andrew Haigh (Weekend) adapted the screenplay from David Constantine’s short story “In Another Country.” Haigh doesn’t rely on swaths of dialogue or melodramatic outbursts: the strength is in the quiet moments, the disappointed, poignant looks, the angry shutting off of a favourite song on the radio.
Rampling excels at saying as much with a look as with a paragraph of dialogue and earned a Best Actress nomination for her understated performance; Courtenay is the picture of rumpled, confused and obsessed with the fantasy of what-might-have-been.
It’s an honest, unsentimental look at what makes a marriage last until older age, and how tenuous even a decades-old bond can be.Â
45 Years opens Friday at Fifth Avenue.
