Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a long married couple whose relationship is disturbed by a letter relating to his first girlfriend, a German who died in the Swiss alps 50 years earlier. Aside from that, not much happens. A shopping trip to Norwich is about as exciting as it gets, on the action front. But this is one of those ‘inaction films’, as I call them, in which nothing happens, but everything happens; it is simple yet absorbingly profound. And it will resonate. It will resonate afterwards and it will resonate the next day and it will resonate the day after that. In fact I am still resonating, and rather wish I wasn’t, so I could move on with my own life. It’s rare for a film to affect me in this way. Gemma Bovery didn’t, for example. Nor Avengers.
This is Haigh’s second film as writer and director after Weekend — about a gay relationship; highly recommended — and is based on the short story, ‘In Another Country’, by David Constantine. It opens with Kate (Rampling) walking the dog near the couple’s home, a cottage in Norfolk. The dog is a German shepherd, which already resonates, as why not a Labrador or spaniel, as you’d expect, for a woman of her age and class? Nothing is answered — why not a golden retriever? — but everything sets you thinking, as well as very slightly on edge. She returns home to discover that Geoff (Courtenay), her husband, has received a letter from the Swiss authorities about Katya, who plunged to her death in the mountains in 1962, and has been discovered in a snow melt, perfectly preserved. She has, quite literally, frozen in time.
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