Berlin Film Festival: 45 years - film review: 'Charlotte Rampling is wonderfully good'

45 Years in delicate, nuanced, a bit slow and over-furnished, and wholly English
Sapphire: Geoff (Tom Courtenay) and Kate (Charlotte Rampling) approach their 45th wedding anniversary
David Sexton9 February 2015

Andrew Haigh's first feature, Greek Pete (2009) was about a year in the life of a London rent-boy. His second, the much admired Weekend (2011), was about two men in their twenties, a lifeguard and an artist, meeting in a gay bar and spending the weekend together becoming tentative lovers, despite the artist being about to head off to the States for a couple of years.

Haigh's new film 45 Years, based on a short story by David Constantine, is also about whether a relationship can endure but in another mode. The Mercers, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) and Kate (Charlotte Rampling), are a retired couple, living sedately in the Norfolk countryside. He was a works manager, she was a head teacher; they have had no children; a large Alsatian dog stands in. They had to cancel their 40th wedding anniversary party for health reasons but now they're planning a big one for their 45th instead.

A week before, Geoff gets a letter from Switzerland, telling him that the body of his long lost German girlfriend Katia, who died in a mountaineering accident 50 years ago, has been discovered at last, through a glacier melting (slightly over-emphatic short story symbolism, this). He's thrown by the news, saying woefully "she looks like she did in 1963 and I look like this". And he tells Kate what he has never told her before, that so far as the authorities there know, he was her next of kin, her husband – for in those days such a pretence was necessary for them to travel together. Kate seems to accept this. "I can hardly be cross with something that happened before we existed, can I?" she says reasonably. "Not really", says Geoff.

But over the next few days – each of them preceded by punctuating views of the misty East Anglian landscape they live in – the marriage begins to crack. Geoff is in a world of his own, planning a trip to Switzerland, and Kate becomes consumed with uncertainty and jealousy, digging out old photographs and diaries. Eventually she asks, if Katia had lived if he would have married her for real? He says not just "yes" but, even more woundingly, "we would have married each other". While Kate continues to draw up playlists for the anniversary party, she starts to wonder if their whole life together has been mistaken. At the party, Geoff makes a heartfelt declaration of love, saying "the choices we make when we're young are pretty bloody important". But Kate looks utterly stricken, Rampling staring off into the distance with those extraordinarily bleak eyes she has.

So 45 Years is not just about the difficulty of sustaining such a long partnership or the intolerable pressures of publicly celebrating such anniversaries, nor even the power of retrospective jealousy. It's about the terrifying realisation that the foundations of your whole life might be wrong and could have been different, once. It's beautifully written (it's very written) and filmed (the framing always gracefully subordinate to the story). Charlotte Rampling, 68, is wonderfully good as a dependable, ever-upright, slightly stiff English country woman, while still looking quite remarkable. As her husband, Tom Courtenay, 77, though giving a fine performance of his own, seems never entirely right, in ways that work against the film as much as for it, partly because he simply doesn't have equal charisma.

45 Years is delicate, nuanced, a bit slow and over-furnished, and wholly English. If you compare it to Michael Haneke's masterpiece about late marriage, Amour, it seems much more contained and less elemental, without that ferocity of love and pain. But perhaps an English Amour was always going to be a contradiction in terms.

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