My Mirror column for Dec 20:
45 Years is a steely drama about ageing and coupledom; a beautifully crafted meditation on the fickleness of time.
The subject of Andrew Haigh's film 45 Years is, unsurprisingly, the passage of time. Starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as an ageing British couple called Kate and Geoff Mercer, Haigh's quietly stunning film takes us through the week before they are due to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary. The somewhat odd choice of anniversary they'll be commemorating is explained by Kate (with characteristic Rampling frostiness) when the event organiser insists on asking: Geoff had to have a bypass surgery just before their 40th.
This time, Geoff is fully recovered, and the week ought to involve only the merest of preparty stress: finalising the menu, planning a music playlist and shopping for a dress. Instead, a letter arrives for Geoff from the Swiss authorities, informing him that the body of his then-girlfriend Katya has been discovered perfectly preserved in an icy crevasse in the Alps, in the place where she fell to her death five decades ago.
Of course, it's a disturbing revelation. But what is more disturbing by far is Geoff's reaction. He starts smoking again (the couple is meant to have quit a while back). He's irritable at the thought of going to a long-planned reunion with old factory mates. He sits around the house playing songs he hasn't heard in years. He climbs into the attic in the middle of the night to look for old pictures of Katya.
And suddenly, just like that, this long-gone figure - a woman who was dead before he met his wife of 45 years - has returned to haunt their present, and somehow alter the quality of their past.
The premise bears some resemblance to another much-loved British classic: Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier's chilling tale of a much younger woman similarly haunted by the imagined memory of her husband's old love. But the fear that creeps up on you in Rebecca draws on the timidity and inexperience of its deliberately unnamed heroine, as well as the evocative ghostliness of the grand British manor she must strive - unsuccessfully - to make a home in. Manderley is already a place haunted by history. 45 Years, on the other hand, gives us amuch older protagonist, as self-assured as can be: the seemingly stronger half of a long-married couple - left-wing, childless, retired, leading a quietly comfortable country life, with a succession of dogs for company.
Haigh evokes the shadowy presence of this other woman through many means: there is the somewhat obvious use of the similarity in names: Katya and Kate, and the metaphor of the attic - a hidden, draughty space at the top of the house which holds its secrets. But the milieu has nothing ghostly about it, and so the shivery, goosebumpy quality of the film is produced almost entirely by the performances.
And what performances they are. Rampling is, as always, an absolute pleasure to watch, here exchanging her trademark icy hauteur for a vulnerability that is all the more affecting for being covered by a veneer of dignified reserve. Much of the film's emotional heft lies in what is not spoken - from that early moment when Rampling rises from the sofa precisely at the moment she knows her husband is going to reach for her hand, to the tightly-coiled tension of the last party scene. The acuity of Courtenay's performance was a surprise to me: he plays Geoff as someone unhappily cognisant that he might be on his way to becoming a muddled old man. He knows age and illness has taken its toll, and he was prepared for a quiet last innings - until the arrival of the letter seems to change something in him. "She'll look like she did in 1962 - and I'll look... like this!" he announces with something like disgust.
I must admit I was glad that this nostalgic evocation of physical youth, this sudden revelation that one's body is not the perfectly wrought thing it once was, comes, in Haigh's film, from the man, not the woman. (Especially since so much of the conversation around Charlotte Rampling, even at 69, seems to centre on how amazing she looks. It is as if no matter what her achievements as an actress, the thing that we must all find interesting about her is how attractively she's aged.)
The film is strewn with references to time and history, and yet it constantly undercuts the idea of commemoration. "This really is a great venue for such an event - so full of history," says the smarmy organiser, alluding to the fact that the building is where the Trafalgar Ball was held. He is soon cut down to size by Kate's retort: "Wasn't Nelson killed?"
A chance meeting with some family friends at an eatery leads to a viewing of pictures of their grandchildren, and a half-wistful realisation that they themselves have not many pictures to mark the passage of the years. And yet, as Kate says in a dialogue that seems to speak sharply to us in the unselfconscious selfie generation: "I guess we didn't see the point of taking pictures of ourselves. It seemed vain."
But what makes Haigh's film so powerful is that it manages to show us a couple basking in the quiet glow of a shared past - and then demonstrate how long a shadow a single event can cast upon it. It is as superb a meditation on the fickleness of time as you could imagine.
This time, Geoff is fully recovered, and the week ought to involve only the merest of preparty stress: finalising the menu, planning a music playlist and shopping for a dress. Instead, a letter arrives for Geoff from the Swiss authorities, informing him that the body of his then-girlfriend Katya has been discovered perfectly preserved in an icy crevasse in the Alps, in the place where she fell to her death five decades ago.
Of course, it's a disturbing revelation. But what is more disturbing by far is Geoff's reaction. He starts smoking again (the couple is meant to have quit a while back). He's irritable at the thought of going to a long-planned reunion with old factory mates. He sits around the house playing songs he hasn't heard in years. He climbs into the attic in the middle of the night to look for old pictures of Katya.
And suddenly, just like that, this long-gone figure - a woman who was dead before he met his wife of 45 years - has returned to haunt their present, and somehow alter the quality of their past.
The premise bears some resemblance to another much-loved British classic: Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier's chilling tale of a much younger woman similarly haunted by the imagined memory of her husband's old love. But the fear that creeps up on you in Rebecca draws on the timidity and inexperience of its deliberately unnamed heroine, as well as the evocative ghostliness of the grand British manor she must strive - unsuccessfully - to make a home in. Manderley is already a place haunted by history. 45 Years, on the other hand, gives us amuch older protagonist, as self-assured as can be: the seemingly stronger half of a long-married couple - left-wing, childless, retired, leading a quietly comfortable country life, with a succession of dogs for company.
Haigh evokes the shadowy presence of this other woman through many means: there is the somewhat obvious use of the similarity in names: Katya and Kate, and the metaphor of the attic - a hidden, draughty space at the top of the house which holds its secrets. But the milieu has nothing ghostly about it, and so the shivery, goosebumpy quality of the film is produced almost entirely by the performances.
And what performances they are. Rampling is, as always, an absolute pleasure to watch, here exchanging her trademark icy hauteur for a vulnerability that is all the more affecting for being covered by a veneer of dignified reserve. Much of the film's emotional heft lies in what is not spoken - from that early moment when Rampling rises from the sofa precisely at the moment she knows her husband is going to reach for her hand, to the tightly-coiled tension of the last party scene. The acuity of Courtenay's performance was a surprise to me: he plays Geoff as someone unhappily cognisant that he might be on his way to becoming a muddled old man. He knows age and illness has taken its toll, and he was prepared for a quiet last innings - until the arrival of the letter seems to change something in him. "She'll look like she did in 1962 - and I'll look... like this!" he announces with something like disgust.
I must admit I was glad that this nostalgic evocation of physical youth, this sudden revelation that one's body is not the perfectly wrought thing it once was, comes, in Haigh's film, from the man, not the woman. (Especially since so much of the conversation around Charlotte Rampling, even at 69, seems to centre on how amazing she looks. It is as if no matter what her achievements as an actress, the thing that we must all find interesting about her is how attractively she's aged.)
The film is strewn with references to time and history, and yet it constantly undercuts the idea of commemoration. "This really is a great venue for such an event - so full of history," says the smarmy organiser, alluding to the fact that the building is where the Trafalgar Ball was held. He is soon cut down to size by Kate's retort: "Wasn't Nelson killed?"
A chance meeting with some family friends at an eatery leads to a viewing of pictures of their grandchildren, and a half-wistful realisation that they themselves have not many pictures to mark the passage of the years. And yet, as Kate says in a dialogue that seems to speak sharply to us in the unselfconscious selfie generation: "I guess we didn't see the point of taking pictures of ourselves. It seemed vain."
But what makes Haigh's film so powerful is that it manages to show us a couple basking in the quiet glow of a shared past - and then demonstrate how long a shadow a single event can cast upon it. It is as superb a meditation on the fickleness of time as you could imagine.
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