Andrew Haigh – ’45 Years’
There’s no knowing when you engage in a loving relationship with a significant other what the future will hold. Will my decision have been the correct one? How long will our love flourish? Instead of agonising over definitives, you simply trust in the love that you’ve constructed. In the case of Andrew Haigh’s modern 2015 masterpiece, this love lasts for 45 years until a spectre from the past engulfs the gaze of his protagonists and questions their true connection with one another.
Concise and beautifully ephemeral, David Constantine’s short story on which the movie is based, Another Country, provides the seed from which Haigh’s film flourishes and the relationship of the two lead characters falls apart. The elderly couple, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) and Kate (Charlotte Rampling), are soon to be celebrating almost half a century of marriage when a letter carrying a novel of emotional weight lands on his doorstep.
“They’ve found her,” Geoff utters, referring to his first love whose body was never recovered from a tragic accident in the Swiss mountains, “you know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”. The body of Katya, Geoff’s former German flame, has been found perfectly preserved in ice many decades after the incident itself, with the revelation driving a wedge between the two parties of the marriage.
Grief invades their home, with the discovery of the body resurfacing old feelings of loss for Geoff, whilst Kate is left to rediscover herself, trying to piece together whether she was always the light of his life or whether she was an appropriate alternative to his beloved Katya. Like an adolescent teenager spellbound by his nostalgia for youth, Geoff shuffles around the house, unearthing old memories from the past, including relics from his past in the attic.
Adapted from Constantine’s story with true creative innovation from Haigh, the carefully curated image of the married couple begins to collapse with just one small crack that exposes wounds old and new. As an analysis of grief, regret and nostalgia, 45 Years is a marvel of human emotion, with the ethereal presence of the past flowing through the house like an incoming mist, pervading the relationship and causing irreparable damage in the process.
Indeed, the more Geoff is lost down the trapdoor of fictional nostalgia and fictional possibilities, Kate is left to pick up the pieces, allowing doubt to creep into her own subconscious as she grieves for the loss of what once was a perfect marriage. Doubt pokes, prods and taunts Kate’s mind, sullying her love for her husband as Haigh weaves a film that forces the viewer to also grieve for lives we’ve never known or loved.
This concealed pain is bottled by Rampling, who delivers a sensational performance as a broken woman whose identity has been shattered, whilst her co-star Courtenay, too, gives remarkable dedication to his role, embodying the mind of a man caught in a web of his own fantasy. Together, the duo manage to capture, at one time, a lifetime’s worth of adoration, and the next, an ethereal feeling of emotional disconnect, flowing between being unabashed lovers and two strangers with baffling ease.
Moving from scene to scene like a melancholy ballroom dance, little happens in the film aside from the initial revelation, allowing it to grow and fester, taking over much of the movie, just like it infests the minds of the protagonists. It all ever-so-steadily builds to the duo’s 45th wedding anniversary party, which they plan throughout the movie, where friends and family gather to celebrate the culmination of their love.
Spiritually revisiting the start of their marriage, the pair dance to the same first song from their wedding, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ by The Platters, whilst the eyes of their relatives celebrate their ‘resolute’ love. Meanwhile, Kate’s face shivers with angst, how does she know that her true love was indeed ‘true’?
Haigh’s film deconstructs the pain of regret and doubt with eerie precision, asking the viewer how much we can really know about the genuine emotions of those closest to us.
