45 Years
First screened in October 2015 / Most recently screened and reviewed in September 2024
Director: Andrew Haigh. Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James, David Sibley, Dolly Wells, Richard Cunningham, Sam Alexander. Screenplay: Andrew Haigh (based on the short story "In Another Country" by David Constantine).

 Twitter Capsule: In which two women step into the same crevasse. Exquisite acting and writing, finessing conceits that could've undone it.

VOR: ④  Crafting a tale this subtle is hard enough, without extra challenges of perilous metaphor. Tough takes on aging that aren't about death are equally rare.


   
Photo © 2015 Sundance Selects / The Bureau / Creative England
I unthinkingly watched this the day after my own 25th anniversary. I am titanium.

Was considering 45 Years for next month's film group, where everyone's on average a generation older than I am. But as incredible as this movie is, I am not trying to mess with people's marriages.

Charlotte Rampling is really stellar here, not least because a modern filmmaker finally dislodged her from the realms of the iconic, the archetypal, the stylized, and/or the unfathomable (in all of which modes she has, of course, frequently excelled). Then, from within one of her most everyday characters, the kind of woman who pulls on her jeans, drinks tea at the window, gets her hair cut like the rest of us, the film and the actress open up a fissure of almost total self-negation, through zero fault of the character's own. Haigh keeps 45 Years right at the precipice of domestic realism, staring into the vastness of parable. The film works in both registers and is equally haunting in each, as is Rampling's precise etching of undeniable epiphany, curiosity, resistance to what she knows, affection despite it all, horror despite all the affection, and the coerced keeping up of appearances in public and in private.

Tom Courtenay is as masterful in this as Rampling is, but got less credit for it away from their double-win at Berlin. His character simply can't make up his own mind between presenting the most plot-crucial information to his wife as a delicate confession of what he's pointedly held back and as a disingenuous "reminder" of something she learned decades earlier and ought to have recalled. Courtenay's Jeff has a way of getting vocally restless and sometimes physically sclerotic when he's being less than truthful, hands clawing and neck craning while he speaks. But he also suggests that Jeff is one of those bolshy, argumentative types who's that way routinely, including when he's being most honest. He drops hints that Jeff is already dealing more with the fogginess of advanced age than his wife is, but he may also be bolstering that impression out of convenience. He suggests that the news of Katja's death has opened a sudden abyss in him, too, but also conveys, despite our limited access to his perspective, how he's been living consciously with that abyss all this time, and regularly taking silent walks down into it, perching on outcroppings halfway down, mourning, contemplating, wondering, peering. He's also funny. It's masterly work, better than all five of that year's Best Actor nominees combined.

Props also to Lol Crawley's lighting and Suzie Harman's costumes, both of which play with glaciated blues and greys, rarely conspicuously but without insisting on "subtlety." The sound team led by Joakim Sundström interjects at key moments, some more obvious than others, a soft but howling mountain wind, incongruous to the literal setting but poetically suggestive in more than one way. And Haigh's direction is artful in these and in every other area of his craft, all the way from punchy decisions about who or what to omit from a frame even when they're key to the scene, to the flavor and testiness he brings to outer-ring story beats (like the delicious, low-level, mutual testiness between Rampling and the man in charge of renting the party space). He's a deft gauger of rhythm, in concert with editor Jonathan Alberts, frequently allowing their cuts a stinging sharpness even when mood, dialogue, and performances are relatively understated.

And there are tiny storytelling nuances all over, embedded in Haigh's formal decisions. An early one: Rampling standing at her kitchen window, gazing with her tea into the disconcertingly bright, almost harsh morning light (again, the natural and the heightened in a delicate balance), then panning over to where she asks what letter her husband is reading with such consternation, and then panning back with her as she leaves the table, once again alone at the sink and the window. The same shot as moments before, which only drives home and darkly ironizes that it's already a different world. Grade: A–

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Academy Award Nominations:
Best Actress: Charlotte Rampling

Other Awards:
Berlin Film Festival: Best Actress (Rampling); Best Actor (Courtenay)
National Society of Film Critics: Best Actress (Rampling)
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Actress (Rampling)
Boston Society of Film Critics: Best Actress (Rampling)
European Film Awards: Best Actress (Rampling)
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