One of the great joys of being in a long-term relationship is the comfort that comes from feeling you know everything about your partner.
It’s highly likely you don’t since we all tend to keep things large and small from the people we love, no matter the level of intimacy between us, but by and large, there is an assuring sense that we know this person, that all the really important stuff is known to use and that whatever else happens in life, we can depend on the surety of this one fact alone.
But in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years – he both wrote and directed this moving, finely-nuanced film – this presumption of well-informed intimacy is shaken by the revelation that one partner has been keeping a very big secret indeed from the other.
Kate and Geoffrey Mercer (the inimitable Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay respectively) find themselves in this most unsettling of scenarios when a letter arrives in the week the couple are celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary, letting Geoff know they have recovered the body of his onetime German girlfriend, a woman he dated in the early 1960s who died in an accident when the pair were hiking with a guide high up in the Swiss Alps.
While Kate knows of Katya’s existence, and Geoff assures her he must have told her of much more than that over the years, the news that the woman who preceded Kate in Geoff’s affections has figuratively sprung back to her life begins to push apart the couple on degrees large and small.
While Geoff, who is increasingly less engaged with the present following heart surgery five years earlier – hence why their 45th wedding anniversary is being celebrated rather the more traditional 40th – loses himself in memories of Katya, spending his nights in the loft watching old lofts and re-reading his travel journals, Kate is left unmoored, wondering if she has ever truly replaced Katya in her husband’s affections?
As hard as she tries to be the loyal, supportive wife, encouraging Geoff, initially at least, to talk about the discovery of Katya’s perfectly-preserved body down in the glacial ice is affecting him, Kate increasingly realises that Katya has cast a very long shadow indeed over their marriage.
What unnerves Kate is the extent of what Geoff hasn’t told her, each discovery about the depth of his and Katya’s relationship causing her to ask herself if she was simply a poor second choice for the man who clearly lost the love of his life way back in 1962.
Geoff rushes to assure her that isn’t the case, and his speech at the wedding anniversary party is the stuff of which romantic dreams are made, but in the initial aftermath of a succession of revelations, Kate’s world, forged over 45 assuring years, is rocked to the core.
Based on In Another Country by David Constantine, 45 Years throw a slow, meandering but deeply emotional spotlight on what happens when the past and the present collide in ways that come close to overwhelming us.
The important thing to remember is that we’re seeing Kate and Geoff in the immediate aftermath of the letter and the revelation it unleashes; given months to process things, and the depth and strength of their marriage, it’s highly likely Kate would process the onrushing emotions and their relationship would emerge all the stronger for it.
But arriving as it does in the week of their anniversary, when thoughts can’t help but turn to the past as much as the present, the news resonates far more dramatically than it might otherwise have, and we bear witness to what happens when our assumptions about the one we love the most are questioned.
45 Years is contained to the week leading up to the anniversary party so we don’t see Kate and Geoff’s life together either before or after these pivotal events, making the way things unfold for both of them all the more intense.
Part of the film’s appeal is that its intensity takes places within the fabric of a well-worn life, one not without its passions or intimacy – one night the two of them dance together to an old tune they both love and it’s clear there is a great deal of friendship and love close to the surface; theirs is not a rusted-on, lifeless pairing – reminding us that even the most dramatic of events don’t pause life.
It continues on unabated, and we saw the couple catching up with close friends George and Lena (David Sibley and Geraldine James), going on errands, walking the dog (something falls to the more engaged with life Kate primarily), very much caught up in the present while the past swirling in and around them and their relationship.
It’s meditative, thoughtful narrative, which effectively immerses you in the unfolding disquiet of a relationship at the crossroads, though not terminally so, allows you to feel as if you are a part of their relationship, witnessing its ups and downs in a quietly tumultuous week.
The film is a brilliantly well-paced exploration of the way in which we all rest on our lives on a series of assumptions that are rarely challenged, particularly where a longstanding relationship is involved.
It also asks us how we might handle revelations of the sort that confront Geoff and Kate – would we stand steadfastly in the surety of what we know or we question everything, uncertain all of a sudden if everything we have believed is lies?
There are no easy answers given in a film in which Rampling is mesmerisingly superb as a woman teetering on the edge of what she knows and what has been hidden from her, but therein lies much of its power – much as we would like to think we would handle such a situation with aplomb, we have no way of knowing how we would react or how our relationship would fare until these unsettling events befall us.