Review: 45 Years

Birdsong heralds the opening moments of the piercing marital drama, 45 Years. It seems of a piece with the picturesque Norfolk countryside presented to us by writer-director Andrew Haigh, but it also portends a disturbance. Indeed, barely five minutes have passed before Haigh sets off the first depth charge.

"They found Katya...my Katya," Geoff (Tom Courtenay) announces to his wife Kate (Charlotte Rampling). That "my" - quietly dropped by instinctively included - stealthily burrows itself into Kate's bloodstream, unleashing a slow and steady poison. Years and years ago, before he and Kate ever met, Geoff was in love with Katya, a young German woman who fell into a crevasse and died as they were out walking in the Swiss Alps. Nearly half a century later, her body has been discovered, perfectly preserved in a glacier. "How strange it would be," he thinks, "if she looked like she did in 1962, and I look like this." He wonders if he should go see the body, but Kate doesn't understand the point. One can sense that she is trying not to be too unsettled, that perhaps this may simply be a storm to weather. They are, after all, about to host a party to celebrate 45 years of married life.

Yet something significant has shifted and Geoff, lost in the remembering of his former love, does not appear to realise the further damage he is inflicting by sharing that he and Katya were posing as a married couple - surely he must have mentioned it to Kate at one point? In any case, if he neglected to, "it's hardly the sort of thing you tell your beautiful new girlfriend, is it?" She knows that she shouldn't be upset at something that happened before she and Geoff existed, "but still."

But still... "Memories - they're things, aren't they?" Kate notes, and Katya, like the first Mrs. de Winter, becomes a powerful and threatening presence, reminding Kate of all that was and all that never happened. Even the twinning of their names suggests the alternate life Geoff might have had. A trove of photographs, hidden away in the attic, feature Katya, forever young. Kate and Geoff, meanwhile, barely have any photographs decorating their home. They never had children or grandchildren, perhaps it would have been nice to possess visual reminders of their dogs, their first home, the first time they saw each other on the dance floor. It was Kate that Geoff married, but it was Katya with whom he established a more substantial history.

45 Years is a simple film but the caliber of its telling and especially of its two lead performers turn it into something profound and almost daring. Haigh keeps the tone rigorously understated to the point where 45 Years almost functions like a thriller - what new detail will be revealed about Katya, how much longer will Kate tolerate his talking about Katya before she reaches her breaking point... A scene in which Kate clicks through photo slides of Katya is positively cataclysmic - each click like a stab in the heart and the softly murmured "Oh!" as Kate uncovers one crucial detail that Geoff has withheld is devastating.

Rampling and Courtenay are brilliant. Her performance will most likely be the more lauded, but her nuanced portrayal would not be nearly as impactful without the excellence of his playing. Geoff is deceptively the weaker of the two - his heart bypass got in the way of their 40th anniversary celebration, he's dependent on her to drive him into town - and Haigh frequently obscures or omits him altogether in the frame. Yet the news of Katya rouses him and slowly diminishes Kate, and her emotional disintegration reaches its climax in that painful closing scene set to the old classic, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."

Rampling is nothing less than glorious, deeply eloquent in her restraint that every flicker is seismic. Despairing, envious, unsure - whatever the emotion, Rampling is majestic.

45 Years

Directed by: Andrew Haigh

Written by: Andrew Haigh; based on the short story "In Another Country" by David Constantine

Starring: Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James, David Sibley