Image: www.britishfilmfestival.com.au
A long-married couple prepare for their wedding anniversary, wandering around their countryside house, wistfully reflecting upon times gone by, and wantonly dredging up memories both happy and not so. It’s a situation rife with simplicity, delving into the routine and the mundane too; however charting four-and-a-half decades of matrimony inspires an abundance of not just intimacy, but intricacy and complexity, as fleshed out through a series of small moments and quiet gestures. In adapting David Constantine’s short story In Another Country as feature 45 Years, writer/director Andrew Haigh (Weekend) wades through the fallout when a long-term bond is tested by unsettling revelations, and watches as a husband and wife reassess their life together. Comfort gives way to questioning, colouring everything shared, then and now, including nostalgia.
As the retired pair in the spotlight, Geoff (Tom Courtenay, The Legend of Barney Thomson) and Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling, The Forbidden Room) count down the days until a party marks their latest milestone together — though what should be a week of celebration and happiness unexpectedly takes on a mournful tone. The news of the discovery of the body of Geoff’s former girlfriend from fifty years ago, encased in ice for all that time, rattles the duo amidst catch-ups with friends and finalising the event, inspiring his trawling through the details and mementos of his past, and her following lines of enquiry that she might not actually want honest answers to.
Though the central figures intermittently venture beyond the confines of their home, attending to errands and social outings together and separately, 45 Years dwells in the space they’ve chosen to call their own. As Haigh demonstrated with his just as personal, perceptive and profound previous film, he’s fascinated with private interactions — first meetings and the post-coital aftermath in Weekend; a combined life and the weight of a merged world here — unfurling beyond the prying eyes of others. Stripped of the need to compose themselves for anyone outside of their relationship, the characters become immersed in their unified realm, exploring each other while also discovering more about themselves, for better and for worse.
Indeed, 45 Years‘ setting conforms to the cliché of offering an unavoidable presence in its own right, though nothing about its minutiae comes across as convenient or contrived. Its textures and trinkets emulate its inhabitants, with well-loved furniture, modest possessions, overflowing shelves of unfinished books, items that need fixing and an absence of photographs each telling in their way. Within this environment, Geoff and Kate sift through their romantic baggage, alternatingly settling into and bristling against what was previously a safe haven. Watching their movements stiffen within their home, along with their glances, discloses as much about their unravelling connection as the dialogue they sometimes mutter to, sometimes fling at each other.
Haigh and his technical team ensure the echoing of the physical and emotional — and the interior and exterior — only continues, heightened by cinematographer Lol Crawley’s (The Reflektor Tapes) fondness for framing the troubled couple through doorways, mirrors and windows, and editor Jonathan Alberts’ (TV’s Looking) penchant for holding the feature’s patient gazes into their eyes for several beats longer than might be expected. Both in the production design and in the way everything is lensed and spliced together, audiences can feel the tension that infects the house and traps its residents. Appearing in the same film again after 2013’s Night Train to Lisbon, Courtenay and Rampling are the crowning glory within the movie’s procession of precision, their portrayals as finely tuned as all surrounds them. Devastation, both through grief and through the fracturing of a marriage, has rarely swelled with such elegant, inherent sorrow as it does in their performances, nor has the tainting of a beloved place and loving people with inescapable doubt and uncertainty.
That’s where 45 Years packs its biggest punch, softly delivered as it may be, with the disarming, delicate efforts of the two veteran, award-winning actors providing the knockout blow that makes the tale ripple with reality. Within a scenario societally recognised as a motivator for taking stock of one’s life and choices, they give flesh and feeling to a film following the same train of thought that crosses every mind about paths not taken, potentially wrong decisions made, and spaces people have claimed as their own but perhaps shouldn’t have. That the end result, the place the feature haunts, is equally subtle and stark is perhaps unanticipated, even as the narrative heads in the only direction and to the only point it can. As Geoff and Kate gradually realise a lonely existential truth about the individual nature of our pasts, memories, thoughts, dreams and senses of self, even for those who have shared something largely warm, fulfilling and spanning the titular timeframe, so does the viewer.
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
45 Years
Director: Andrew Haigh
UK, 2015, 95 mins
British Film Festival
Sydney: 27 October – 18 November
Melbourne: 28 October – 18 November
Adelaide: 28 October – 18 November
Perth: 28 October – 18 November
Canberra: 29 October – 18 November
Brisbane: 29 October – 18 November
Byron Bay: 29 October – 18 November
In general release: February 18, 2016
Distributor: Madman
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