SPOILER ALERT: Some plot revealed, but it doesn’t much matter for this movie.
This isn’t a full review of the new movie “45 Years,” which I saw last weekend, but rather a brief summary and a very strong recommendation that you see it. Starring two wonderful actors, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, it’s based on a short story by David Constantine. Rampling and Courtenay play Kate and Geoff, a British couple married for nearly half a century (ergo the title) and looking forward at the end of the week to an anniversary celebration with their friends. The party was a delayed celebration of their 40th anniversary, interrupted by Geoff’s bypass operation.
During the week, Geoff gets a letter saying that the body of his long-ago girlfriend Katya, killed in a hike on a Swiss glacier, has come to light under the ice. (Imagine seeing the body of someone you dated 50 years ago, preserved exactly as she was, while you’re now a decrepit old man.) It turns out that Geoff got the letter because he was named as the girl’s next of kin: to get lodging in Swiss inns, they had to pretend they were married.
This disturbs Kate, who didn’t know about the marriage pretense, and, as Geoff begins to behave weirdly—staring to smoke, being distracted, and not looking forward to the party—she quickly realizes that that long-ago relationship meant far more to Geoff than he ever let on. She asks him if he would have married Katya had she not died, and he answers “yes.”
Kate then investigates his belongings in the attic and comes across something that makes her realize exactly why Geoff was so fixated on Katya. The changes that both Rampling and Courtnay go through during the week are wonderfully acted, culminating in the couple having it out (not fully—they’re British after all) and Geoff vowing fealty to his wife. Near the film’s end, you think all will be well as Geoff makes a loving toast to Kate at the party. But all will not be well: it’s clear as the film closes that Kate will always wonder if Geoff has been honest to her during their 45-year marriage, something she clearly shows not with words, but with fleeting facial expressions.
It’s curious that none of the reviewers have compared this movie to James Joyce’s The Dead, my favorite piece of fiction in English. Both the movie and novelette have similar plots: a man (in Joyce) or a woman (in “45 Years”) discovers that their partner is still fixated on a long-dead lover from their youth, and both are left wondering whether their marriage has been largely a sham, and the love of their partner always tainted by the greater love of an earlier partner. The parallel is obvious and strong.
Here’s the movie’s official trailer; it will give you a flavor of the film, which gets a rare 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Do see it if you can; it gets Professor Ceiling Cat Emeritus’s highest movie recommendation:
Just as a point of interest, Dr. Coyne, you might like to google Stan Rogers’ song, Forty-Five Years. He’s a well-know Canadian folk singer and that was the only love song he ever wrote. Very poignant, like the film, I assume.
Suspect that 98% rating may be due in part to a LOT of us having similar feelings re. a former partner.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
“The one that got away” always has huge psychological advantages over the one that’s become a fixture in your life for decades.
I will watch this. Thank you. The emotion, inner worlds, dialog, and acting look incredibly interesting from the trailer. And I’ll read The Dead.
Also, Charlotte Rampling – what a cool name – sounds so ’40s and noir. Assumed it was a stage name but just looked and it isn’t. Even better!
I’ve had the hots for Charlotte Rampling for most of my adult life, and she’s still beautiful. Rampling always sounds like something I’d like to be doing with her in the hay 😉
Well, I don’t think I’ll take my wife (of 37 years) to see this one….
Not sure if I want to see it. I’m saddened watching the trailer. The problem with beautifully made films in the ‘realism’ category is they remind you of reality and it’s capacity for sadness, and disappointment. They can haunt you for years after.
On the other hand many are awaiting another Star Wars with excitement. I’m stuck in the middle.
These are the kinds of movies I watch when I’m sick and home alone.
Otherwise there needs to be chase scenes and time travel. Maybe weapons fire.
Oh. Another Dr. Who fan.
Me too.
Know whatcha mean, rickflick. These days I can conjure up enough sadness and what-might-have-been-ness without help.
That said, it looks like an exceptionally well casted and played film.
Romanticism, the human emotion of love is such a fraught and fragile illusion. Imagine the illusion that we should only love one other. How fragile is the psyche?
How would ‘love’ be explained by Tinbergen or Lorenz, surely not as some jealous self deception?
What lies cold, dead in the mountain, but not forgotten or undreamt of is essence of romantic love.
Songs and stories teach us the illusion before long before and long after we have fallen in love.
Does anyone believe in love at first sight? I am certain it happens all the time we look into the mirror. We always want love to be what we want love to be; if we are willing to make the effort, it can always become real even if it is only manufactured and arbitrarily chosen.
There are an awful lot of people on the planet, we would be a crappy species if there really were only one possible mate.
I remember reading years ago some sagacious researcher concluded years of study with the conclusion that almost any random assortment of mates could manage to make reasonable marriages. I suspect he’s basically right.
Damn, Charlotte Rampling continues to age gracefully.
As for Sir Tom — well, it’s inspiring to see that he’ll still doff his shirt on screen, like some pre-mcconnasaince Matthew McConaughey.
Looks like a great flick. Thanks for the capsule review.
Yay, a movie starring and made for adults!
A rarity in the youth-obsessed movie market.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I’m in!
I hear there’s a remake in the offing staring Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth.
All that remains is to keep the project “in turnaround” for the next 45 years, until the actors age into their roles.
(I’m sure the award-winning Ms. Lawrence would acquit herself well in the role, as she invariably does. I can’t speak to Hemsworth, as I’ve barely a passing familiarity with his work.)
And one in which the female lead isn’t young enough to be the male’s daughter or granddaughter.
Nine years difference (I checked). I originally thought there was a bit more than that. But even if there were, it wouldn’t carry the same squick factor at their ages (78/69) as it does in the traditional Hollywood fare with younger leads.
I have no problem with age differences when the movie is about a May-December romance (with either sex being in either month — as if). It’s when Hollywood sticks a codger in with an ingénue and acts like nobody will notice — or, if they do notice, will accept it as trophy-wife-as-usual — that it gets gross.
“…as if.”
😀
Harold and Maude notwithstanding.
Another pet peeve–when an actress not much different in age than the male lead plays his mother. (Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate, notoriously.)
Yeah, Angela Lansbury is one of those actors who seems to have been born, fully formed, as a forty year-old. I don’t recall her ever being of other than the mother (or, later, grandmother) generation. (I think she played Elvis’s mother in one of his dreadful movies, too.)
I was shocked on learning that Anne Bancroft was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman when playing Mrs. Robinson to his Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. (I think she was a wonderful actress in everything she did, btw.)
Funny you should mention Harold and Maude; that’s was on my mind when I wrote that line, as the exception that proves the rule.
I suppose there are probably some “cougar” movies out there now featuring older women and younger men. Yet that doesn’t seem to me to solve the problem, maybe only somehow to make it worse.
I will take this occasion to note that although I have seen about a dozen Kurosawa movies before, I caught one of Professor Takkaten’s favorites for the first time this past summer, Ikiru, about which he waxed quite eloquent here. (https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/free-kurosawa-movies-for-the-weekend/)
It was as marvelous as he said, so I have considerable confidence in our hosts positive film recommendations.
(Nonetheless, I waxed hot and cold on and would have awarded 3 out of 5 stars to “Tree of Life” which apparently Prof Planchement Puss gives zero. But his response to this so reminiscent of my own to “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”, I somehow still sympathize.)
I’ve found with film aficionados whose opinions I respect, I almost always agree with them on the movies they really like — but disagree with them more often on the movies they pan (because their reasons for disliking a movie can be idiosyncratic).
That seems right to me too. But, it raises the question, why wouldn’t the films they like be chosen just as idiosyncratically as the ones they dislike? A persons likes and dislikes, you would think, should be the result of the total genetic and experiential inputs to the brain.
I think there are minimum standards of filmmaking proficiency that must be met before any knowledgeable fan or critic will rate a movie highly. Thus, while most of us have guilty-pleasure movies we like despite how poorly they’ve been made (and, sometimes, precisely because of how poorly made they are), nobody’s gonna rate those movies as “great.”
Someone can dislike a movie, on the other hand — even well-made ones — for almost any reason at all.