45 Years
Directed by Andrew Haigh
The film is an exploration of a 45-year childless, sedate marriage put in crisis by revelations of a relationship long suppressed. Set in The Broads area of Norfolk County, England, the film opens with Kate (Charlotte Rampling), the wife, a retired teacher confidently walking her Alsatian through the muted colors of the flat East Anglia countryside. Farm buildings, plowed fields and leafless trees set in patches of dull green, feel of late fall and set the tone of the film, the staid tranquility of English country life and of a marriage that has been lived with little drama. Kate, returning home, finds her husband Geoff (Tom Courtenay), a retired plant manager and a man of leftist leanings, reading a letter. He seems confused and disheveled. He speaks of nouns and verbs not understood. The letter is from authorities in Switzerland. The body of his long-dead girlfriend, Katya, has been discovered frozen in the glacier where she died of a fall in 1962. Her body frozen in time hasn’t aged, while Geoff and Kate have deteriorated through the living of their lives. Kate is confused as to why they are notifying Geoff. He said he told Kate about her, he remembers telling her as if it was yesterday. And so we begin to slowly receive the story of a relationship mentioned long ago, but quickly and quietly buried as deeply as the now melting glacier fissure in which Katya’s frozen body still rests. The first revelation Geoff gives to Kate is that the Swiss believe he is Katya’s next of kin. From that moment, the tone of the film begins to slowly change. Geoff had not told Kate the whole story, not even close.
The Anniversary
The background of the film is an anniversary party, delayed five years by Geoff’s illness and surgery. Somewhat older than Kate, he has become a man cared for by his wife—he no longer drives where he likes but is driven. The party preparations take place over a period of seven days, as the story of the old relationship is slowly unwound. Geoff journeys into the past beginning to both reveal and relive his relationship, while Kate tries to make sense of what is happening. There are several scenes in bed where talk turns to Katya. Geoff speaks of his past as Kate begins to believe Geoff’s feelings for long-dead Katya are still very much alive. How has this affected their relationship over the years? He says “we would have married” if she hadn’t died. How have his feelings for Katya tainted their lives together? As is said, our past lives our present. Kate, unable to further listen, ends the “pillow” talk. Later, Geoff, after a failed attempt at reconciliation by dancing and sex, is drawn to the attic where his past life stored in notebooks and slides has been entombed. Kate reacts as a wife who suspects her husband of having an affair; she discovers the core secret during a viewing of slides taken during the relationship. She tracks Geoff to the travel agent where he had been exploring the possibility of a trip to Switzerland. In the following confrontation, she never reveals to Geoff the extent of information her snooping has given her, his deeper secret, but rather she holds it. Geoff tells her he is now too infirm to go “climbing mountains,” but that the unheeded wonderings of his youth had once given him a purposeful life. Kate has had enough. She now knows something about her husband that he doesn’t know she knows. Is there power in that? She asks only one thing—to keep up appearances for the anniversary party. This begins a transition for Geoff, for the moment at least, he has purpose; somehow he has worked through his past and accepts his present. From her being his caregiver, and the active force, the roles reverse, he becomes the active and she takes the more passive role. He gives her exactly what she asks for, but for Kate it is not enough she has lost her power, her sense of control, 45 years of deceit is just too much. As they dance to their wedding song at the anniversary party—Smoke Gets in Your Eyes —her eyes now opened are filled not with tears but with anger. But where does she go from here? Awakened to the sham that her life and relationship with Geoff has been, she just burns from the inside. It’s too late.
A Life Worth Living?
This well-crafted film allows the actors to become immersed in and to explore their roles and relationship. That people can live quite well and happily together for 45 years without really knowing one another. Do couples ever reveal everything about their past lives? Are they the “open books” they often claim to be? So the plant manager and the teacher strive for and achieve a comfortable bourgeois existence. A once purposeful life left behind for the comforts of country life. But it seems a stale life, of dogs in lieu of children, and what is there in the end? Two lives that weren’t even worth recording in photographs.
As we age in ordinary life, we tend to become frozen in habit and fear; our habits, our routine keeping us from feeling our fears. Isn’t this what people generally seek—quiet comfort? I keep myself “busy” with my comfortable routines, friends for companionship, hobbies, and so forth. Worse, I go to drink or drug to suppress what feeling I have left. Or perhaps I have money and spend it on travel, buy a yacht or whatever it is that makes me feel young and “alive.” But what happens when a shock is received and my life upended? How do I react, because I will react, I will be taken by the event? The film explores the shock and aftermath in a sensitive and in depth manner putting us in the middle of two lives unexpectedly having come to a crossroads when both saw nothing but a glide path to an uneventful “landing.” Mr. Gurdjieff says we die by thirds, meaning our centers die or become more and more inactive. Kate never cries during the film, giving the sense that she has lost much of her ability to really feel. She plays Mozart briefly and there arises a glimmer of life before the piano is shut, she shuts down the radio as it plays a song that brings up Katya, she simply shuts down. Ironically, Geoff, who shows little emotion and is physically withering away, eventually shows he can still feel, that he is at least for the moment, still alive, as he tearfully breaks down during his speech at the anniversary party. Our past lives our present unless we bring the past into the present and can consciously integrate what arises. Geoff by mucking things up, unconsciously in his fumbling way, manages to free himself at least for the night. While Kate, awash in self-pity and anger holding on to the “secret” buries herself, frozen in a past that wasn’t even her own.
—Richard Myers— http://www.growingchoongary.com
Open to Openness 