45 YEARS 2nd September 2016

 




In the beautifully acted drama “45 Years,” a marriage lives and dies; we watch its agonized struggle, like a butterfly impaled on a pin. It’s a quiet movie, taking place over a week in the lives of Kate and Geoff Mercer (Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay), a retired British couple happily anticipating a party for their 45th anniversary. In the opening scenes, Geoff receives unexpected news: The body of his long-ago girlfriend, who died in a mountain accident years before he met Kate, has been recovered. “They’ve found Katya,” he tells Kate with a quavery desperation in his voice. “My Katya.”
It’s a tiny bit of news, a pinprick, but it lets the air out of their marriage. Kate tries to make a little joke — Katya, she says, must still look like she did in 1962 — but Rampling lets the laugh die on her face. From there, the Mercers go about their lives as the week plays out, but something’s off, something’s festering. Unable to stop herself, Kate begins digging through boxes in the attic, trying to understand what this woman meant to her husband for so many years. Ultimately, she confronts Geoff about the ghost in their marriage: “She’s been standing in the corner of this room, all along, behind my back.”

 Writer/director Andrew Haigh (“Weekend”) knows that he has gold with the pairing of Rampling (who’s been nominated for an Oscar for her work in this film) and Courtenay, and his camera calmly watches as they tear our hearts in two. Courtenay’s Geoff has a fragility, a gentle vagueness; he doesn’t always seem to see Kate, and doesn’t know what she needs to hear. Rampling’s character, by contrast, is a slow-burn simmer.

By Moira Macdonald
Seattle Times movie critic
Actors: Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James.
Written and directed by Andrew Haigh.
Length: 95 minutes.
Rated R for language and brief sexuality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ONE FINE MORNING 3rd May 2024

Image
  Sandra (Seydoux) lives in a small apartment in Paris with her eight-year-old daughter. Her parents have long separated, and Sandra regularly visits her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), an academic whose health has begun to deteriorate.  Whilst she and her strong-willed mother (Nicole Garcia) struggle to agree on finding Georg a safe place to live, Sandra unexpectedly reconnects with an old friend, Clément (Melvil Poupaud). A passionate relationship begins to form, but not without repercussions. Hansen-Løve,  so finely observant of the small nuances of human interaction,  weaves autobiographical elements into this delicate and heartfelt story of familial and romantic connections, and finding strength against challenging odds. Seydoux is radiant as her lead, bringing tremendous warmth and empathy to her role and the film as a whole. Enthusiastically embraced by both critics and audiences as one of the best films of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, ONE FINE MORNING is, quite simply, Frenc
Read more

MY OLD SCHOOL 1st December 2023

Image
  In 1995, a 32-year-old failed medical student called Brian MacKinnon became a global news story and a legend when it emerged he had, two years earlier, posed as a teenager called Brandon Lee to reattend his old school, Glasgow’s Bearsden Academy, taught by his old teachers who did not recognise him, just so that he could retake his Higher exams and reapply to medical schools, which would not admit people over 30. One of his classmates was Jono McLeod, and it is McLeod who has directed this film about MacKinnon’s extraordinary true-life tragicomedy, interviewing his school contemporaries and using animated sequences with Lulu and Clare Grogan voicing incidental characters. He also interviews MacKinnon himself who did not want to appear on camera, lip-synched instead by the actor Alan Cumming.  With staggering chutzpah, this grown man put on a school uniform and bluffed his way through class, befuddled pupils who didn’t want to mention how weirdly old he looked, delighted teachers with
Read more

THE ROAD DANCE 3rd November 2023

Image
     Based on actual events, this 1916 story is set in a small, tight-knit community in the Scottish Outer Hebrides. Kirsty McLeod (Hermoine Corfield) lives a difficult life in a remote village with her hard-working mother, Mairi (Morven Christie) and her sister, Annie (Ali Fumiko Whitney). Ever since the days of sitting on the beach with her late father, listening to him talk about the world beyond their shore, she has been a dreamer. And while her father may be gone, she still dreams of more than planting potatoes. She wants bigger things but those dreams seem so far out of reach as the outside world is bracing for the First World War, bringing brutality and tragedy. The Road Dance is filmed in an exquisitely realised setting on the Isle of Lewis, from the stone houses with grass covered rooftops to the people who make up the community. They  bring an authenticity and character to the film.
Read more