45 Years is a memorable film about a husband and wife preparing to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary, who are suddenly reminded that, contrary to what they may have thought, memories and photographs are everything.
Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) live a simple, satisfied life in the Norfolk countryside, listening to classical music in their country cottage, walking the dog, and dining with close friends. When we meet them, they are preparing for a party that will, in an appropriate fashion, celebrate their lives together.
Five days before the event, however, Geoff receives a letter that shakes him to the core. The body of an old girlfriend, Katya, has been found frozen in ice in a melting glacier in Iceland. It takes some time for Geoff, who is reticent and a bit doddery, to open up to the more au fait Kate about who Katya was and what she meant to him.
But, the more Kate discovers, the more troubled she becomes, so much so that, when the night of the party arrives, doubt is cast as to whether even the seemingly happy couples can ever really claim to know each other.
45 Years is a minor tour de force, both in the perfectly pitched performances of the two ageing stars (Rampling and Courtenay have acted in more than 100 films in toto), and in the way the seemingly simple story is told. From the credits onwards, sound plays a vital role in the storytelling. Music comes from an on or off-screen source, a radio or a vinyl disc being played, and all the sounds of daily life – the wind, birds, footsteps, someone humming a tune, shutting a door, the ring of a mobile phone – convey mood and meaning in many ways more real and compelling than a conventional soundtrack.
45 Years is about discovery. The camera lingers documentary-style on distant shots of Kate and Geoff’s cottage in the flat landscape, before moving quickly to intimate shots of the couple in their home, together in their bedroom or alone in the attic, much like a secret recorder, threatening to expose what has long been hidden.
What is revealed in 45 Years speaks to us all. The film suggests that, beneath the surface of our lives, the past lies intact and frozen. The arrow of time moves forward into the future, but the past is always present, colouring who we are and what we do. Some moments in time, we willingly capture in snapshots. Others, we prefer to bury until an event (represented by climate change in the film) brings it back to life.
45 Years can be enjoyed without such an elliptical approach. But the film is based on In Another Country, a short story by the director which is set not far from the Norfolk Broads, a network of waterways which features prominently in the 1971 film adaptation of L P Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between.
Hartley’s novel begins with the proverbial line: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. As 45 Years shows, the past may well be a foreign country in time and place, but it can still come back to haunt us.
Jan Epstein is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.