Archive | Age Matters
‘45 Years’: Rampling’s Many Looks
“45 Years” opens with a sixty-something woman walking briskly along an English country path. It is a grayish morning but not an unappealing one, and she is humming “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as she walks her dog on a leash. The song proves prescient: She greets her postman, enters her modest Norwalk home, hands the mail to her husband as he is groggily sipping his tea, and then watches her life explode, though it takes the duration of the film for her to realize what she has witnessed.
The woman is Kate (Charlotte Rampling), and her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), has just received a letter stating that the body of his long-lost sweetheart has been discovered, perfectly preserved, in a Swiss glacier fifty years after she went missing on an Alpine hiking holiday the two had taken together. “It was a fissure – like a narrow crack in the rock,” says Geoff of the fault that claimed the woman’s life, but he may as well be describing the fault that will now splinter his marriage. Kate, with whom he is poised to celebrate his forty-fifth anniversary, has heard virtually nothing of this girlfriend he calls “his Katya” and for whom he has been named next of kin. Thus this film, directed and adapted by Andrew Haigh from David Constantine’s very fine short story “Under the Dam,” is a ghost story with no real ghost, not to mention an infidelity tale with no real infidelity. Continue Reading →
The Church of Extroverted Introverts
Yesterday was unseasonably warm—so warm that I felt compelled to stay outside the whole time the sun was out, as if I were a squirrel stuffing acorns in her cheeks (though with climate change, who knows how long this weather will last?). It was my first day off since Thanksgiving weekend, so I sat out with my coffee shop Muppet critics, bopped down to the farmers market, read my book on a bench with one eyebrow cocked at the early-afternoon brunchers. Around 3 pm I rolled over to Gowanus to toast a pal’s birthday at a backyard bar, and was happy to spend time with a new friend of whom I’ve very fond—at least until the sun dropped, at which point I hit my wall regarding people time and had to scurry home. I fell asleep on the subway—if I’d been wearing a red hat everyone would have assumed I was yet another Santa Con casualty—and put on my nightgown two minutes after I walked through my front door. Right before I passed out, I realized it was only 7pm.
That’s how I am right now. My back injury of last spring made it clear that I had to stop being such an island and, ever the obedient student, I took note. It also taught me that I had to keep moving—literally and figuratively—so ever since I regained my mobility I’ve been a she-rooster with her head cut off, a blur of grownup-lady bluster, a to-do list that takes no prisoners. I walk at least six miles a day, often right into the heart of what scares me, and it’s not just my waistline that thanks me. Continue Reading →