"45 Years," Ten Years Later...
Thursday, February 6, 2025 at 10:00PM 
The past is never gone. You think it is, fall into the comfort of believing it dormant, but one day, it awakens and rocks the foundations of the now. This is true of historical cycles, of political waves and culture and vales. It's true of love affairs, too. Of marriage and cinema. 45 Years is a rumination on such ideas, having premiered at the Berlinale a decade ago today, where it signaled the maturation of Andrew Haigh into one of Britain's most essential filmmakers after his promising beginnings in the realm of queer cinema - Greek Pete and Weekend. It also brought Charlotte Rampling out of the rarefied, vaguely alienated, auteurist plane she existed within for many decades, turning her into someone less adventurous cinephiles came to know and cherish.
She also became a first-time Oscar nominee thanks to Haigh's creation. 45 Years remains the crowning achievement of her career, and the same could be said of Tom Courtenay. The Berlinale Jury was right when it gave them both Silver Bears for their performances…
Based on David Constantine's short story In Another Country, 45 Years considers the lives of Kate and Geoff Mercer, an unremarkable, middle-class, childless couple who spend their days together in the foggy Norfolk landscape they call home. We meet them as they're about to celebrate the 45th anniversary of their matrimony. It's an odd number to make a party out of, yet it makes sense as delayed gratification. After all, Geoff was sick when they were to celebrate their 40th, making that anniversary party a no-go. Compromises are the stuff marriages are made of, and so is practicality. For mature folk such as these, there isn't much reason to stress over such things.
Nevertheless, compromise can also be the hairline crack that grows unseen, spreading spiderweb-like through a rock slab, opening chasms from inside while the surface remains a perfect picture of solidity. Give it a push, a strong enough shove, mayhap a strike, and the fissure will finish its destructive promise. One moment, it looked eternal, a monument for all time. And then the next, it crumbles into a million pieces. 45 Years is that process in slow motion and long takes, approached with a delicate hand and a patient eye. Kate and Geoff aren't careless people so their movie shan't be careless either, not with the audience nor them.
The morning we meet them, the rock of their union is disturbed and the crack of original compromise starts speeding its way out. It comes in the form of an official missive with morbid news. Katya has been found. She was a former paramour of Geoff, a German woman who fell inside a crevasse in Switzerland five decades ago. As the ice melts, her body has come to the surface, and since they once pretended to be married, the authorities consider Geoff as her next of kin. Haigh does very little to underline the gravity of the situation, almost as if the camera were desperate to play normalcy in the same way Kate does, whether out of survival instinct or self-denial.
A parable of a union nearly unmade and a symbolic exercise, 45 Years holds on to notions of placid domesticity with an iron grip that borders on the pathological. It further strains to keep itself within the limits of realism, underplaying the literalist lyricism of the body relinquished from its icy prison. Katya is an old memory, perfectly preserved to the point she becomes a third party in the Mercer marriage. In some ways, she was always there, a ghost at the back of his mind, studiously ignored by Kate. She's etched into a romance that could only come to be in her absence. One supposes this has always been acknowledged between the spouses.
Though, maybe not enough. Not transparently enough, for sure. So perhaps the inciting incident isn't a strike that breaks rock. Maybe it's a magnifying glass. One certainly feels an insistence on observing Kate observing, with many scenes staged around images of Charlotte Rampling expressing silent awareness, inklings of self-destructive curiosity, the recklessness of one who needs to know, discovery, and realizations that hit like epiphanies, each more painful than the one that came before. That is most evident in the film's two most famous scenes – a carousel of slides that discloses a bit of information Geoff never did, and the Mercers' last dance.
Still, 45 Years is much more than two remarkable scenes and the genius of Charlotte Rampling's remarkably introspective tour de force. For starters, Courtenay is just as brilliant as his scene partner, navigating a part that lacks the camera's allegiance in the same way hers does. We are never as intimately aware of Geoff as we are of Kate, but the actor gives us all we could ask for, including a fair amount of insinuation, some contradiction. How much of this man's reaction to the news is past regrets resurfacing and how much is a consequence of a psyche more comfortable in the past than the present? And is that trouble with recent memory an honest malady or an overplayed performance of spaciness on his part?
Not that the film is critical of Geoff and uncritical of Kate, making this a story of his wrongdoing and her victimization. It's never that simple in life and 45 Years is movie enough to admit it. Moreover, it's movie enough to be shaped by a principle of uncertainty that lingers long after Rampling pulls her hand away and the credits roll. That idea manifests in various aspects, going deeper than the characterizations as presented in text and actorly interpretation. Consider the form, an adherence to realism that doesn't dogmatically follow the rules of kitchen sink drama or other traditions of social-conscious British filmmaking. It doesn't subvert them in its repudiation either.
Instead, Haigh and company reproduce some gestures but re-contextualize them through a cold remove that insists upon a reading of the material where melodrama is never the point. I'm thinking of the use of long lenses outside when the camera regards Kate and her friends as part of the crowd walking through the Norfolk streets. It's very early Loach without the rawness or the eagerness to posit the characters as representatives of broader class dynamics. Later, while by herself, Kate's loneliness is emphasized by shorter focal lengths, though we never succumb to the closeup. Then there's the sound, ambient noises taking over, bruising the silence so it always feels tender. In other words, we encounter depictions of calm that never feel calm.
It's uncomfortable and it's unrelenting. I would say it's also beautiful, like so many disquieting things can be, screams smothered in silk. Lol Crawley, now best known for their work with Brady Corbet, shot 45 Years in accordance with these harmonious disharmonies, rendering most exteriors in painterly swaths of morning greys and glacial blues. Interiors are warm-colored but never emotionally comforting, shadows often shot through with grayish grain or given a whisper of coldness. Framing is more presentational than intimate, and not just when using those long lenses outside. Kate's attic discovery, for example, comes to us in shots where objects and structural beams juxtapose her, block her, entrap her in a cruel proscenium.
Hand-held roughness is sanded away for a polished look, and when the camera moves, one seldom feels that it's tethered to the actors' whims. Always purposeful, Haigh's images are never so suffused with emotion that they dematerialize or surrender to stylization – unlike his more recent work in All of Us Strangers. Other artists might have constructed a film where these ideas turn mannered or too overt, more like affectations than affecting cinema. But the director and Crawley, editor Jonathan Alberts, designers Sarah Finlay and Suzie Harman, and all others keep 45 Years light in its heaviness, soft while lacerating.
Revisiting 45 Years ten years later has been a reminder of its subtle, wholly restrained, pared-down majesty. I found myself surprised at how many specific scenes, shots, and beats I could anticipate with clarity. This is a work of art that lingers, alright. Even so, many more facets surprised anew, as a memory reawakened after a slumber, appreciated with new eyes and a new resonance. It all comes down to that ending, doesn't it? The conclusion already seemed perfect ten years ago when I was just coming into my twenties. Now, in my thirties, the pain flaring from the open schism between the illusion of public contentment and the truth of private turmoil is all the more unbearable. It's also more familiar. I can't begin to imagine how it'll hit a decade from now, or two or three. Next time, it might just lay me flat on the ground, knocked out.
45 Years is streaming on Fubo TV, AMC+, IFC Films Unlimited, Paramount Plus, MUBI, Kanopy, and the Criterion Channel. You can also rent it from Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and the Microsoft Store.
Reader Comments (6)
The Larson Robbery.
At least she's atoning on stage next to the great Stockard Channing.
Thanks, Claudio, for this wonderful reading of a film which sits comfortably in my top ten of all time. I haven't seen it since it appeared at my local arthouse cinema here in Edinburgh, Scotland, ten years ago. It continues to haunt me in a way in which no other film ever has. I was well into my fifties when I saw it and although nothing of it was reflective of my own life, the understated atomising of a relationship was devastating. I remember walking out of the cinema at the end both in deep admiration of Rampling's tour de force and also laid waste by it. I hope I'll see it again and it will be interesting to see how it lands now after ten years and in my mid-60s. I'll be braced for devastation!
@Peggy Sue Don't you mean The Ronan Robbery!
I agree on most of what's written but I never get what Courtenay is doing,he's so spacey and out of it as to be unreadable,how does he feel about anything in life,maybe i'll have to view it again.
I was surprised he could not break into one of the weakest Best Actor line ups in years,it' so poor I pick Cranston for the win and am well aware he's doing too much and his nomination came from the love of Breaking Bad which I never even saw.
If that Best Actress win could be considered Grand Larson-y (and that’s definitely an if), it would be against Blanchett or Ronan. Rampling’s performance was not the outstanding one among that year’s nominees.
For me the crowning achievement of Courtenay’s career will always be his stage and screen performances in The Dresser.
That ending is great. The usage of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" by the Platters haven't been this effective since it was used in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Fassbinder. I also love the usage of the Moody Blues' "Go Now" in the film.
I felt so awful for Charlotte Rampling as her character felt like she's second compared to this dead woman. Someone mentioned a great alternate ending in which Geoff and Kate go the place where Katya is found and Kate pushes Geoff to that crevice. The End!
I just rewatched this last month. It's a tremendous performance (shot brilliantly). To me, flip a coin between Rampling and Ronan for the win. They're both great.