My true love was true
I of course replied
Something here inside cannot be denied
They said “someday you’ll find all who love are blind”
When your heart’s on fire,
You must realize, smoke gets in your eyes
To think they could doubt my love
Yet today my love has flown away,
I am without my love (without my love)
Tears I cannot hide
So I smile and say
When a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes
Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years is one of those films that tells the truth about the human experience. It does it in such a pointed yet subtle way, you might find yourself unprepared for how moving it ultimately is. 45 Years is like perfume that clings to a scarf locked away in a drawer, and when pulled out the again the scent is so familiar, so uncomfortably captivating you can do nothing but surrender to all that it recalls. What we keep from our past tells us who we are as we age. What meant enough to us for us to record, photograph, store in boxes is all we have, really, when the door begins to close on our lives.
The role of Kate Mercer seems to have been written for the film’s star, Charlotte Rampling, whose emotional journey as she discovers more about her husband Geoff (an excellent Tom Courtenay) than she really ever needed to know. It’s written on her face — a legendary face now worn with age and time. This is not a woman who lived out loud. This is a woman who came to her marriage with very limited experience. She was young, she was beautiful and she loved only one man who took her from her father’s house and spent the next 45 years as her husband.
As the couple head for their 45th anniversary party, a long buried secret is revealed. The body of the husband’s former girlfriend, or perhaps wife, “Katya” has been found. She’d fallen into an icy crevasse while the couple was hiking and died there. Whatever dreams Geoff once had with her died there too. He went on with his life as best he could; then met and married Kate. That we’re dealing with a “Katya” and a “Kate” probably tells you more than you should know walking into this fine, fine film. It was based on a short story by David Constantine which laid down the framework for what would become a much bigger — yet still somehow quite “small” — story.
The suspense in the movie is wrapped up in the expressions on the couple’s faces as they work through their daily routine — the quiet of their childless lives, with only dogs and each other for comfort. He goes to work. She takes walks. They see friends. They eat dinner together. They brush their teeth and make a good attempt at making love. It is a perfectly fine life. Most of us don’t sign up for perfectly fine lives, though, do we? We are aching for true love, if it exists.
Watching Rampling go through the business of living, all the while pondering what might be going on with her husband once the news of “Katya” emerges. After the news, he seems almost like a different person. She suddenly notices that there aren’t any photographs of them around, and none of her. She talks of wishing they’d captured more memories. He talks about rhow beautiful she once was. But with no photographs to remember those times, they are stuck with the present and all that it brings in the too quiet late, late nights in the countryside.
Rampling is exquisite in the part of Kate. Funnily enough, it might be the performance of the year for any actress. Is it showy enough? Is it too subtle? Those will be the questions people ask when it comes to the Oscar race. None of that means anything, of course. Not in the real world of how art can move us so powerfully we leave the film changed. As beautiful as the past images Rampling conjures in our mind’s eye, this somehow seems the exact right moment when she is at her most beautiful. Her kindness and generosity towards her husband, her sudden realization of how he sees her — are astonishing.
That is what is most heartbreaking about 45 Years. We all throw ourselves into love to be seen. We aren’t really the sum total of our memories, or photographs of who we once were. Kate is a knockout still, 45 years after her husband said she was one. How can we ever know we are really being seen? We hope that when the time comes to pay tribute — when they ask us how we knew our true love was true? We will get the answer.