Andrew Haigh | 45 Years / 2015

youthful—and elderly—decisions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Haigh (screenwriter, 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 publicly 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     Geoff’s sudden withdrawn behavior, a nightly visit to his loft-hidden scrapbooks in search of Katya’s photograph, and other oddities peak her imagination and force her to reconsider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 into 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 it is significant, certainly, 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.

      Although director Haigh, who is openly gay and is known for his gay-themed films, obviously has moved off into a world in this film in which there are no gay figures, he sees it still as a bookend to his gay romance Weekend. Even he shares the viewpoint of some disappointed viewers that the lost figure from Geoff’s past, Katya, was not a man—which certainly might have created far different concerns and issues regarding his marriage to Kate. But Haigh, nonetheless, sees the two as sharing first of all simply a focus on relationships, Weekend nearly all in a possible future, while 45 Years is all about looking to the past. Certainly, after 45 years of marriage, heterosexuals do not usually imagine that a couple might even consider abandoning marriage, as lodged as it is in our minds at that age, beyond 60, as enduring, which even their celebration reiterates.

     But, of course, heterosexuals beyond that age also do keep developing and changing as individuals, and what might have had great meaning earlier in their lives may come to have lesser significance later, particularly given what Kate has now perceived to have been built on a foundation with hidden truths and even lies. For gay men, moreover, far newer to the notion of such an institution and perhaps still feeling somewhat outside the confines of church, state, and even societal embracement, perhaps the sanctity of such a long-termed relationship does hold the same weight, making it even more possible to arrive at the kind of questions which now plague Kate. I say this, moreover, having just celebrated my 56th year with the same man, with only 12 of those years sanctioned by the institution of marriage. We celebrate the day we met, not the day of our institutionally approved marriage. Haigh reported, at the time of this film, having been in a gay relationship for 10 years, experiences which he argues he brought to this movie.

     So perhaps Kate’s dilemmas and doubts reflect more those of a gay person than those of a traditional heterosexual wife. But even older people are often made to feel as outsiders, as Haigh observes, shelved by others as fruited preserves, not readily subject to change. Yet in this film, everything seems to have changed, particularly how Kate perceives her husband, how she now views his love, and her own role in his life. Has she always been an alternative, a second love to fill the gap of his first? And if so, mightn’t she be expected to imagine shifting her role, and seeking out something, even alone, of help her feel of greater significance?

     In fact, older heterosexual couples, most often when their children have grown and left home, quite commonly reach a point in their lives when they feel incompatible and even ready to try out a new life. And as Haigh describes it, when he begin to make films he never saw himself as focusing on gay relationships and subjects.    

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2015 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015).