youthful—and elderly—decisions
by Douglas Messerli
Andrew
Haigh (writer, based on a story by David Constantine, and director) 45 Years / 2015
One of the best of movies of 2015 was the beautifully filmed, brilliantly acted, yet understated work by British director Andrew Haigh, 45 Years. The title represents the number of years the central couple of this film, Kate and Geoff Mercer (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay), have been married. They might have celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary except that Geoff had sudden by-pass surgery. Accordingly, the movie begins with their plans to publically celebrate their 45th, with Kate checking out the space they have rented for the occasion.
Returning home, she encounters the local
mailman, evidently a student of hers when she previously taught school, who
delivers a letter which almost immediately upends the everyday patterns and
comfy structures of their lives, which the director has already established
from the very first moments of the film.
The letter, written in German, reports that, due to global warming, a
Swiss glacier has partially melted, revealing the frozen and still-intact body
of Katya, Geoff’s youthful girlfriend who fell into a glacial fissure while the
young couple were touring Switzerland in the 1960s.
Although, Geoff has told Kate of his
early affair with Katya, his reaction, and his open admission of details he has
not told her, begins to unsettle her. At first, both husband and wife appear to
perceive that this long-ago event will have very impact upon their solid and
long-lasting marriage. But gradually little details about Geoff’s past
relationship create new fissures into which Kate herself may fall. The
similarity of their names, the fact that they both share the same hair-color,
and Geoff’s revelation that he is considered next of kin, since Katya and he
felt they had to pretend marriage in order to stay together in local homes and
hostels, along with the fact that she indeed did wear a small wooden ring he have
given her, all seem to signify to Kate that it was not simply an innocent
youthful romance.
Geoff’s suddenly withdrawn behavior, a
nightly visit to his loft-hidden scrapbooks in search of Katya’s photograph,
and other oddities peak her imagination and force her to reconsider what their
relationship has meant after all these years. Obviously, for both, the sudden
collision of the past with the present and their own obvious lack of mementoes
and drifting memories help contribute to what gradually grows in a crisis of
identity within themselves.
While the young Katya’s body remains just
as it was years before, Geoff is now a somewhat doddering elderly man, and the
recognition of that fact throws him into something like a mid-life crisis
arrived too late. The very power of these changes in her husband also leads
Kate to wonder even more about her husband’s early behavior, forcing her to ask
the important question: whether or not, if Katya had lived, might Geoff have
married her. “Yes,” he admits, they would have been married.
It is almost inevitable that she must
wonder who she has lived with all these years, and that she suddenly must see
him from a very different perspective. As she later berates him, she has
discovered that, unknowingly, she has been living all of these years with the
perfume of a ghost in the house, the ghost lover with whom, indirectly, Geoff
has been living out his life. As a former executive in a cement company, Geoff obviously
has cemented up his past in his behavior with his wife in the present.
When Geoff, just a day before their
planned anniversary celebration, wanders off to the nearby town for the entire
day, Kate, climbing into the loft to revisit her husband’s scrapbooks and collection
of slides, puts the slide carousel on display to uncover not only Katya’s
youthful beauty but to discover the wooden ring on her hand, perched upon a
stomach that suggests that the girl may have been pregnant. Was the decision
that Geoff (and Kate) made not to have children based on that fact?
I need mention that none of this is
actually said, and my perception of it, through Rampling’s remarkable acting
and Haigh’s crafted images, may or may not represent a misconception of events;
but then Kate’s own interpretation of her husband’s behavior and what she sees
may be equally a product of her misinterpretations. But certainly it is
significant that when Geoff finally returns home Kate expresses her
impossibility to speak of her complete horror of what she believes she now
perceives: that much of the life they have together defined was based on
Geoff’s love of Katya.
Both become determined, nonetheless, to
not reveal their crisis to others, and Geoff, in particular rises to the
occasion, lovingly sharing their marriage day with Kate, and at the celebration
voicing the appropriate sentiments, arguing that, as we age we make fewer
important decisions than we do when young, while admitting that the best
decision of his life was to marry and live with his wife. As Kate’s friend Lena
(Geraldine James) predicts, Geoff breaks down in tears. The couple dances to
the song they performed at the wedding, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” a scene of
remarkable sentiment for the fictional celebrants and audience both. But
immediately after, as Geoff raises their hands in acknowledgement of their
survival, Kate quickly drops her arm, as the camera studies her face upon which
she flashes all the fears, anger, frustration and possible forgiveness that the
future may offer up. She is so successful in equally conveying all of these
emotions in just a few seconds that we cannot possibly imagine what choice she
or Geoff, in reaction, will make; and the future, it is clear, is as much
dependent upon her and her husband’s elderly decisions as it was in their
youth.
Los Angeles,
December 27, 2015
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