45 Years

If you are part of a couple and you come in contact with other couples in social situations, you quickly learn that every partnership is unique. Every happy marriage is at least partly a magic trick, an illusion proffered by people who have negotiated a strange compact. Lives do not mesh seamlessly; what might appear to us as natural and relaxed is no doubt the result of compromise and experiment. Couples keep secrets, invent private languages and endure intimate indignities. They come to an accommodation. And so we ought not to presume to know much about anyone else's love affair.

Andrew Haigh's 45 Years is about an English marriage, and those are among the toughest to parse, for the English tend not to voice their feelings, even to themselves. They are not fiery folk who flash and splatter and pour out their hearts in public. They are stoic and reserved and understated, preferring not to call attention to whatever messy and embarrassing drama they are playing out. The English cry only in their private moments and dry poetry.

We begin with a quiet, long shot of a house somewhere in rural Britain -- Norfolk, as it turns out. Tranquility seems to throb through the place, which we quickly learn is home to the Mercers, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay). It is morning and they have been married a long time, long enough that they have settled into a kind of respectful easy silence in each other's company. It is the sort of calm that even innocuous words disturb.

As nothing seems to happen we pick up bits of intelligence -- it is Monday morning, the beginning of what promises to be an important week in their lives. Kate is involved in planning a party to celebrate their 45th anniversary, an event designed to make up for the 40th anniversary party they had to cancel when Geoff needed emergency heart surgery. And a letter has come for Geoff.

It's written in German, and his is rusty. But Kate knows where the German/English dictionary is and soon the code is broken; "They found her body," Geoff says, "they found my Katya."

Suspended in the silent beat that follows this pronouncement is a swell of heartbreak. Before we even know who this Katya was, or who she was to Geoff, we know that it has devastated Kate. You can tell because Rampling lets her eyes slide down.

Turns out Katya was Geoff's girlfriend before he met Kate. They were lovers hiking in Switzerland when she took a misstep and fell into a fissure in a glacier. Now, 52 years later, the planet is warming, the glacier has retreated, and the authorities have found her frozen body, preserved intact. "She looks as she did in 1962," Geoff says. "And I look like this."

And Kate, who looks like Charlotte Rampling, looks as she does. While she has always known at least a little about Katya, the true love lost, she could not have anticipated her returning in this way. She could not have imagined the emotional impact the news has on her or on Geoff, now sputtering something about maybe needing to travel to Switzerland to look at the body. To do something. He does not know what. Just something.

And so another fissure has opened. Kate feels tugged toward the icy blackness waiting at the bottom. Surely she cannot be angry with Geoff, or jealous of the love he knew before he knew her? Can she blame him for withdrawing, for feeling whatever this news of Katya has touched off in him?

Adapted from a short story by David Constantine, 45 Years is a potent, shattering movie about the way that living in the world eventually forecloses all your choices. It's not just that. Except for that poor footing, Kate and Geoff might have ended up living very different lives. And that just when you think you know the person who has been standing by your side for decades, you realize there's a fathomless quality there, that even the heart that beats closest to your own is alien. You can be nothing but alone.

So you do what you have to do. You plan the meals. You do the shopping. You talk on the phone and make arrangements.

This is such a good film, wonderfully acted by adults who understand the implications of their actions. Rampling and Courtenay are magnificent, their performances beautifully calibrated and achingly sad. Haigh has overseen a minor miracle of a film. Watch it while squeezing the hand of someone you love.

MovieStyle on 02/26/2016