Film: Jessica Kellgren-Hayes
Past Present
Director of beautiful gay drama The Weekend, Andrew Haigh’s new film 45 Years is an intelligent and moving drama about the fallout of from old news causing a retired husband and wife to rethink their lives together.
Like his previous work – including American TV series, Looking – the fabulous devil is in the tiny details. This is a film that will stand up with Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage (1973). Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay play Kate and Geoff Mercer: a childless, retired couple, living a quiet existence in a bleak Norfolk.
Kate, a former headteacher with a natural authority and severity, is still widely liked and respected in the local community. Geoff rose through the ranks at a local engineering business, from shopfloor to manager – but it wasn’t a particularly high climb. As an ex-union man, he loathed the Tory culture of the 1980s and its return bristles against him now. He is stroppy when drinking and attempting to give up smoking isn’t helping.
As the drama begins, Kate and Geoff are organising a party to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary. Quite a large affair is planned since their 40th anniversary was cancelled due to a medical crisis that may or may not have been psychosomatic.
Despite the placid poignancy of this elderly couple getting into the marital bed every night in their shapeless, old T-shirts, something feels ominously wrong about the number ‘45’…
A few days before the party, Geoff receives an official letter from a small Swiss police force: the body of his ‘wife’ has been found!
In 1962 Geoff was on holiday with his girlfriend, Katya, when she fell to her death in an icy glacier. In those more-conservative times it was best for couples to fake a marriage when booking hotel rooms and thus Geoff was listed as her next-of-kin.
Kate is astonished at the reveal of this arrangement – was Geoff more deeply in love with Katya than he had been willing to previously let on? Surprisingly, this blast from the past also revitalizes the marriage as they are both reminded of their younger selves – alive with possibility. But in the days that follow, a dreadful truth emerges…
The theme of this superbly intelligent and moving film is the terrifying persistence of the past; how the past can appear both more important and more alive than anything in the present, how it can never be repressed without returning and weakening its repressor. 45 Years ponders heartbreakingly on the impossibility of truly knowing another person and just how awful that gulf becomes as the older a couple grows. Rampling and Courtenay are superb and the film will make your heart grow as it breaks.
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