“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 →
