‘45 Years’
Charlotte Rampling hits new heights
45 Years
15 cert, 93 mins
★★★★★
Dir Andrew Haigh
Starring Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James, Dolly Wells
Andrew Haigh’s follow-up to his acclaimed indie film Weekend is called 45
Years, which is a strange wedding anniversary to celebrate with a full-scale party, as the venue co-ordinator in this shattering, shivery marital drama remarks. Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) is quick to explain: the party for their 40th was cancelled at short notice, you see, when her husband Geoff (Tom Courtenay) underwent bypass surgery.
Comfortably off, Left-wing and childless, this provincial couple have a week to go before the muchpostponed occasion: theoretically a week of planning, dress purchasing, a bit of social fretting. Instead, it becomes the week when a cold, stony nugget of realisation sinks to the bottom of their marriage and stays there. It’s spurred by a letter to Geoff from the Swiss authorities, explaining that the perfectly preserved body of his ex-girlfriend, Katya, has been found, 50 years after she slipped into an Alpine crevasse.
Katya has been rarely mentioned between these two, and evidently not in years. Geoff ’s need for a cigarette straight after receiving the news is not a good sign: they’re meant to have quit smoking. And when he goes rooting around in the attic, looking for photos of Katya in an old scrapbook, in the middle of the night, you watch Kate’s whole demeanour calcify, and fear anew for their future happiness.
Haigh’s script for Weekend did that trickiest of things and made pillow talk believable. Here, he’s adapted a short story by David Constantine – a tiny, suggestive shard of a thing – and fleshed it out, adding the anniversary context, some minor characters, and a much more expansive ending. It could have become stagey, or overly verbose, a feast of recriminations to rival late Ingmar Bergman. Instead, it’s pointedly still, and sculpted to make the conversations mere starting points. All the real clues are in the acting, the pauses between lines, and what the camera’s doing to register the damage done.
Rampling can be a stalactite of icy rage if directed that way, or a repressed, spinsterish presence – like cinema’s black widow. She’s rarely been better than she is here, in the role of a placid, dog-walking, tea- drinking middle-class Brit, who finds the floor abruptly falling out beneath her. If anything she’s the one dropped into a crevasse, the victim of an extreme case of emotional climate change. The way she plays Kate, with gentle probing turning into increasingly terrifying passive aggression, the suspense of the movie hinges on the possibility of forgiveness, and you watch that dolllike, rather disturbing visage minutely for signs of a thaw.
Courtenay, meanwhile – lately one of our most underused great actors, despite the likes of Last Orders (2001) and Quartet (2012) – has a perceptive, oddly feminine, and brilliantly specific way with monologues, seeming to juggle in his head what needs to be said and perhaps, even more urgently, what needs not to be. They’re a powerhouse duet, not quite at the advanced age of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in
Amour, but certainly holding a candle to those performances.
Haigh’s – and Constantine’s – best metaphor for the unspoken, almost forbidden spaces of their combined history is that attic. It sends a downward chill into the house, and reverberates with half-remembered sounds of glacial, biting wind – blasts from the mountainside, long ago, returning to give them frostbite.
When Kate herself clambers up, finds photo slides and slips them into the projector, she sees something that leaves her ashen and unsmiling, as if stabbed to the core.
This story is about whether secrets can be survived, whether the knowing or not knowing is more injurious. Haigh’s very fine, classically modulated film keeps these questions alive until literally its last shot, and lets them jangle their way through you for days afterwards.
‘Rampling has rarely been better than she is here as a placid Brit who finds the floor falling out beneath her’