The consequences of climate change impacts in a very real and intimate manner in 45 YEARS, the latest virtuoso film from Andrew Haigh, the director of the wonderful, WEEKEND.
The Broads, England, green and leafy and majestically shot in a wide screen establishing shot, is the home of Kate and Geoff Mercer, and their German Shepherd, Max.
Kate is preparing for their 45th wedding anniversary to be celebrated on the coming Saturday when a letter arrives from Switzerland for Geoff on the Monday.
The body of his then girlfriend, Katya, lost in a glacial fissure fifty years ago, has been found, due to a thawing of the hitherto inaccessible crevice.
This news sends a tectonic shock through the bedrock of the couples’ relationship, a distant past threatening an avalanche that will engulf and destroy the present and leave their future on a precipice.
Based on a short story IN ANOTHER COUNTRY by David Constantine, a title that conjures L.P. Hartley’s opening line of THE GO BETWEENS,- ‘the past is a foreign country.’
In 45 YEARS, that foreign country becomes hostile, invading the present green and pleasant nation of two, Kate and Geoff, led by a ghost general, Katya, a person from a place alien to Kate but intimate and familiar to Geoff.
Feelings of replacement and displacement wrack Kate as Geoff recedes into a nostalgia zone she has no entree into. He regresses into smoking again, something abandoned since his coronary bypass.
His behaviour creates suspicion of secrets kept and that suspicion prompts surveillance and sleuthing by Kate. Spouse snooping is utterly out of character for the sophisticated former school teacher but her feelings of alienation from the husband she thought she knew so well are pervasive.
45 YEARS looks at the history of a marriage and how the prehistory of that period can impact.
Are omitted facts tantamount to lies, should the debris of the past be tidied in hope for a fresh start future?!
45 YEARS is a book end to Andrew Haigh’s previous film WEEKEND which chronicled the difficult beginning of a love affair. This time he explores a relationship that has endured but is suffering sub-strata erosion.
Cinematically gorgeous with allusions to Hitchcock’s REBECCA and Preminger’s LAURA, and with a soundtrack that conjures and counterpoints and comments on the couple’s life together, then and now – Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, So Happy Together, To Sir with Love, Young Girl – the film stands or falls on the interior emotional storm suffered by Kate and stand it does by Charlotte Rampling’s steely performance.
Her co star, Tom Courtney, has been nominated twice before but this is Charlotte’s first Academy Award nomination, and is, I am sure as much for this singularly superb performance as it is for her remarkable body of work –Angel Heart, The Verdict, Under the Sand, The Swimming Pool, Stardust Memories, The Night Porter, to name but a few.