45 Years

 I45 Years is a modest family drama about an elderly couple on the eve of celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary.  Geoff and Katy Mercer live near Norfolk in the U. K.  As they make plans for the celebration -- a DJ has been hired and a hall rented -- Geoff receives a rather macabre letter.  The body of a young woman, apparently well-preserve, has been found at the bottom of a fissure in a Swiss glacier.  Geoff has been contacted because Swiss authorities regard him as the dead woman's "next of kin."  The corpse has lain for fifty years undiscovered in the depths of the mountain glacier until climate change melted the edges of the icefield and exposed the body.  The dead woman is a German girl named Katya who was once Geoff's girlfriend.  In order to avoid problems renting rooms, Katya and Geoff claimed to be married and, in fact, at one point, Geoff tells Katy, his wife, that if the couple had made their way to Italy, as they planned, he would have made her his wife.  

Geoff and Katy are in a rut.  Geoff is feeble and doesn't get around much anymore.  Katy is more active, walking a big German shepherd named Max each morning.  They don't have children and seem not to have any close friends, an impression that the movie creates but that is belied by the party scenes at the end of the film -- it seems that hundreds of people have come to the anniversary party.  The discovery of the corpse of Geoff's fiancee from fifty years earlier exposes rifts in the old couple's marriage.  Geoff becomes obsessed with the dead body and the climactic forces that exposed it.  He even sneaks into town to inquire about buying plane tickets to go to Switzerland to see the corpse.  (He decides his health is too poor for him to make the trip -- five years earlier Geoff and Katy's fortieth anniversary party had to be deferred because a heart attack required that he have bypass surgery.)  Geoff creeps out of the marital bed when he thinks Katy is asleep to look at fading souvenirs from his relationship with the German girl -- he has saved these things in the "loft", a word that here signifies the attic to the couple's house.  Katy climbs into the "loft" herself and discovers a journal as to the hike in the Swiss Alps fifty years earlier.  She looks at some slides on a projector and discovers that it may be that Katya was pregnant when she died.  In a tense conversation, also in bed, Geoff says he would have married Katya if the accident had not occurred.  Things deteriorate between the couple.  Kate feels betrayed by the fact that Geoff never told her that he was dead girl's "next of kin" -- she has been generally aware of the love affair, however, throughout their marriage.  However, Geoff says that he wants to start anew and goes with Kate for her early morning walk with Max.  At the party, huge numbers of people congratulate the couple.  Geoff makes a sentimental speech about his marriage to Kate and breaks down in tears.  The couple dance to the Platters' song "Smoke gets in your Eyes".  Geoff seems happy and grateful for his marriage to Kate.  For her part, Kate looks suspicious, skeptical, and unhappy -- what else hasn't Geoff bothered to tell her about?  As we struggle to interpret the expression on Kate's face, the movie ends.

45 Years directed by Andrew Haigh is made in the very best, most fluent "international art house style."  This means that the mise-en-scene features extremely long shots, long takes, and very few close-ups.  The camera is often placed in a deliberately inexpressive location.  You have to pay close attention to the action and dialogue, much of which is very poetic in character.  Tiny effects are used to create almost subliminal effects.  When a rift develops between Kate and Geoff, the camera angle shifts in a jarring way to a completely different axis of observation, violating the 180 degree rule and creating an effect of discontinuity.  As they speak in bed, Geoff makes the admission that he would have married Katya but for the accident.  Kate is stricken and, when she turns to the light on the bedside table to shut it off, her face is bathed in an eerie, jaundice-colored radiance.  The dialogue is highly literate and ingenious and the scene-setting is excellent.  (The only criticism that I have is that the movie paints the couple as rather isolated -- they seem to have only one couple as close friends -- but, at the end, we see that they are feted by everyone in the small town at an elaborate, crowded affair; this is inconsistent with the isolated, lonely atmosphere that characterizes most of the movie.)  This is the kind of picture in which every detail is carefully configured.  For instance, Kate goes on boat ride over channels in a peat bog; this resonates with previous dialogue about the corpse preserved in the glacier as being like the "Tollund Man", a bog body discovered in Sweden, Geoff recalls -- mistakenly as we learn; Kate's a teacher and has taught a "unit" on the bog bodies to her elementary age students and she notes that the Tollund Man was found in Denmark.  This exchange between the couple illustrates the heightened friction between husband and wife and the eerie motif of a corpse-like figure from the past reaching out with dead and icy hands to harm people in the present.  Geoff is played by Tom Courtenay who acts querulous and feeble -- he tries to have sex with his wife at one point, but fails.  Charlotte Rampling acts the part of the extremely intelligent, but brittle, Kate.  The story about the preserved body found in the glacier derives from Fred Zinneman's last film, Five Days one Summer (1982), in which a woman widowed for fifty years looks upon the frozen corpse of her young husband entombed in a glacier.  This episode, the only thing memorable about the Zinneman film, in turn derives from a famous anecdote by Hebbel (Unverhofftes Wiedersehen), one of the most celebrated short prose pieces in German literature -- the story involves an old woman who confronts the dead body of her husband preserved for forty years in a "vitriol pool" in a mine where he died in an accident.  The story about the discovery of a magically preserved corpse shown to an elderly person who loved the dead person is haunting, suggests all sorts of morbid thoughts, and suggests the possibility of the remote past intruding upon our complacent lives and wreaking havoc on them. (Ernst Bloch said that the tiny anecdote -- it's less than a page long -- is the "most beautiful story in the world."  45 Years is very good if you're in the mood for a somber story of this sort, a tastefully made art film too discrete and reticent to resolve the issues that it raises.