The title of Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years refers to the length of time that the two central characters, Kate and Geoff Mercer (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay), have been married. The film, which Haigh adapted from a short story by David Constantine, takes place over the course of a week, at the end of which is an elaborate party they have been planning to celebrate their anniversary. “That’s an odd year to celebrate,” the director of the event hall muses when told it is their 45th anniversary, and Kate explains that they had to cancel their 40th anniversary celebration due to Geoff needing surgery. But, such is life: You can plan all you want, but life will intrude and have its way.

Something similar, but ultimately much more devastating, occurs again, except this time the intrusion comes in the form of a letter from Switzerland that arrives one morning at the quaint, comfortable house where Kate and Geoff have retired in Norfolk, England. It is at first unclear what the letter contains, partially because it is written in German and Geoff can only partially translate it without a dictionary. We know it has to do with a woman named Katya, whose body has been discovered in a melting glacier. This information shakes Geoff, and we eventually learn that Katya was his girlfriend (and perhaps more) several years before he met Kate and she died while they were hiking in the Swiss Alps, her body plummeting through a crevice where it couldn’t be retrieved. Now, more than 50 years later, her body has resurfaced due to global warming, bringing with it a dimension of Geoff’s life about which he has not necessarily been completely open about with Kate. “I can hardly be cross with something that happened before we existed,” she says at one point, although the manner in which Geoff responds to the news of Katya’s discovery suggests that perhaps their relationship has not been everything that Kate thought it was.

Of course, it is possible that Kate is simply overreacting to the situation, but it is also possible that the sudden and unexpected news has revealed something about Geoff of which she was previously unaware. So many things in their highly routine-driven life are still the same, but she starts noticing little changes in her husband. He starts smoking again. He steals away in the middle of the night to look for something in the attic. He is more agitated and easily roused, getting worked up about politics in a way he hasn’t for years. He goes into town to inquire about plane travel to Switzerland after telling her that he wasn’t going to. He seems a little more distant, preoccupied, easily agitated—clearly not quite the same, which throws off Kate’s entire understanding of their life together. What, exactly, have they had all this time if news about the discovery of Katya’s body could shake their seemingly solid foundation so deeply?

Haigh, whose previous film Weekend (2011) was about a brief encounter between two gay men, is a storyteller who is drawn to outsiders, and he deals with his characters with a rare insight, sensitivity, and subtlety. Few if any films are made about older characters, and most of those fall back on stereotypes and clichés about aging that Haigh sidesteps entirely. By centering the story on Kate and her experience, he aligns us with her slowly crumbling worldview, which makes her deeply sympathetic. Yet, Geoff is not cast as a villain, even though we are not given the degree of insight into his actions that we get with Kate. Rather, we see him through her eyes, which makes it difficult to determine what is happening at any given moment. Like Kate, we want to assume the best, but there are simply too many signs that something is wrong, something has changed, something is no longer the way it was. The depth of that problem is the mystery at the heart of 45 Years, and there are moments that Haigh plays almost like a thriller, albeit never at the expense of the film’s deeper emotional resonances. It is a deeply felt film, one that benefits greatly from Haigh’s avoiding conventional hysterics and trusting that truth resides in moment of ambiguity. In that way, he is able transcend the obvious and touch on deeper, sometimes unsettling realities about the complicated, messy ways we live and love.

Copyright © 2017 James Kendrick

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