Movie Review: 45 Years
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
45 Years is tenacious, presenting a soft, blistering meditation on the genuine love story. The film effortlessly proves that tenderness and compatibility make a love-filled marriage, but the magic of 45 Years is its careful study of what uproots the surefootedness of that love. How slight that ripple starts out, even when a marriage seems unshakable, is the heartbreak of the film. More to the point, in the least breakable marriages heartache is experienced the most strongly. The film follows 
Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) over six days at their home in Norfolk, England, leading up to their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. When Geoff receives a letter about Katya, his love before he met and married Kate, the news has devastating effects on the couple. Navigating these effects is particularly painful when they would otherwise be reflecting on a life of nearly half a century together as their celebration approaches.
With a humbling quietness (the film is carried by the sound and movement of Kate’s precise caring and Geoff’s bearish charm with only source and ambient music), 45 Years is concerned with the “aftermath” temporality of pasts shuffled into present, much like Suzanne Bier is in After the Wedding. Not much occurs in 45 Years by way of traditional filmic plot development. Everything that happens does so slightly, carefully, reflecting the nuance of care between Kate and Geoff in their old age, and how they try to treat each other with this challenging news. Their life is domestic at its most essentialist, held together by daily ins and outs that arrange themselves around an intimate knowing of the other.
When Kate sees Geoff smoking, she worries out loud they will both start again (later in the film, she has a smoke). Their love is unequivocally a “we love” and their connection relies on them being comfortable in that knowingness. Katya’s news is an intruder, and after a few days, Kate says she cannot discuss her anymore. Though it is Geoff’s past recalled, igniting his own painful attempts to synthesize his story with Katya, Kate’s delicate yet merciless questioning of what she has built with Geoff – the soul of the man she committed to, the legitimacy of their love, the foundation of their life – becomes the soul query of the film.
Directed by Andrew Haigh, Rampling and Courtenay give tenderized performances and are supported by a fine, small cast of actors as their close friends. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have nominated Rampling for a Best Actress Award for her role, her first acting nomination from the Academy in a fifty-year career of notable performances. (The IFC Center in New York City is currently screening eight films of Rampling’s earlier work.) Haigh, who won Breakthrough British Filmmaker from the London Critics Circle Film Awards for Weekend (2011), likens 45 Years its thematic sequel. Weekend explores the love between two men who meet at a nightclub, then spend the weekend together. Haigh is developing a fine eye for deep intimacy storytelling, fixating on short periods of time to explode the underbelly of his character’s follies as they struggle with being in love through metamorphic circumstances.
Kate becomes increasingly tormented by imagining Katya as the week goes on, and eventually watches an old slideshow of Geoff and Katya. The shot centers on Kate’s motionless expression as she clicks through the images. When we finally see what Kate sees, the image of Katya is small and slightly out of focus. At the end of 45 Years, Kate has possibly regained her faith, believing she is her husband’s true love and their life is a result of choice, not accident. If not in her mind, at least in her reality, the one her husband displays as they celebrate their longevity, is this real.
Dina Paulson-McEwen
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