"One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand." — Edward Albee
“Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.” — Anton Chekov
Mash those two quotations together and you might come up with something that evokes the delicate balance of stylized realism and metaphorical theatricality in Andrew Haigh's 45 Years, an unnerving semi-absurdist chamber drama in seven discrete acts. I think it's the most fully realized feature I saw in 2015 because (as I've said about certain Coen Brothers pictures), as you watch it, you recognize that it's firing on all cylinders (character, story structure, dialogue, performance, color, framing, mise-en-scène, sound design, cutting, music, etc.), using forms of cinematic expression most movies don't even know are available to them.
“45 Years, adapted — and entirely re-envisioned — by the director from a short story ("In Another Country") by David Constantine is a deceptively simple story about a long-married couple who have been skating along, obliviously and complacently, on what turns out to be perilously thin ice. When that ice cracks, then shatters, they and their marriage are plunged into unfathomable, bitterly cold waters.
“So, we start on the deceptively smooth surface: It is one week before a party celebrating the 45th wedding anniversary of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay). Geoff receives a letter regarding Katya, his young love from long ago, who died when she fell into a crevasse as they were hiking over the Alps. Climate change (something bigger than all of us that we can't see, but we still experience the consequences) has made Katya's body visible through the ice. Eventually, it will melt and the gush of water will carry her — preserved more or less as she was when she died — downstream into the village below, out of the past and into the present. (Enough conceptual/visual/physical metaphors for you? 45 Years takes place in a universe swimming with them.)
“That's unsettling news by any measure, and at first it unsettles Geoff the most. He becomes more distracted than usual and starts brooding, as if he is finally facing the grief he has repressed for all these years. But Geoff's withdrawal unsettles Kate and triggers a re-assessment of her own dormant, troubling feelings about her vision of herself, the shape of her life, and her marriage. What might have been a minor temblor becomes a major quake that shakes up everything they once took for granted about themselves and each other.
“45 Years is written and constructed like a chamber drama, broken into seven segments, short acts named after the days of the week counting down to the anniversary party. At times you feel the ghost of Edward Albee, with hints of Strindberg, Ibsen and Chekov. I was reminded particularly of Albee's A Delicate Balance (in which an unnameable dread is introduced into the seemingly cozy marriage of an elderly couple); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in which a metaphorical shared fantasy becomes a pawn in a marital power struggle); and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (in which a man's passion for another lover devastates his family).
“The diegetic use of pop songs from Kate and Geoff's past is so theatrically and figuratively dead-on that it's sometimes quite hilarious, as when Kate punches the car radio as Gary Puckett starts singing, ‘Young girl, get out of my mind…’; or when you realize during the first scene in the kitchen that Kate and Geoff chose ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ for their first dance on their wedding day: ‘When a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes…’ By the end, Kate seems to have really heard and understood those lyrics for the first time.
“And yet for all these theatrical devices and allusions, 45 Years is richly cinematic, with an attention to detail few films can match. It doesn't literally display or explain its themes (as both Albee and Chekov advocate above) so much as it keenly observes its characters and suggests what they might be going through. Much of the drama is necessarily ambiguous, but thrillingly so. Take the last shot of the exterior ‘prologue’: Kate has been walking their German Shepherd in the countryside and just before they enter the driveway of her house, the Shepherd stops and looks past the camera, alerted by the barking of another dog off-screen. That's an early indication of how much of the drama here will be taking place out of sight. Further up the driveway, Kate encounters the postal carrier and congratulates him on the new baby his wife has delivered. And it's that carrier who hands childless Kate the handful of mail with the letter about Katya. She takes it into the house and we hear the dog's presence below the frame during the next scene in the kitchen, even though he is unseen most of the time.
“Sometimes a conversation will take place between Kate and Geoff with the latter out of frame (or behind a wall). The house itself creaks and cracks and moans in the wind, as though we were hearing this old marriage straining to withstand the buffeting of unseen forces. (Writer-director Haigh writes of keeping old notebooks and journals in his attic, but fearing that their emotional weight would cause them to come crashing down on him though the ceiling.) A shot from outside the house shows Kate framed in a window, her image blurred and distorted as if she were Katya, viewed through the ice.
“The real story here, of course, is not about Katya's fate, or the impending anniversary party, though they are essential plot devices. And it's not limited to familiar (but still essential) themes regarding the dangers of denial; or the dangers of honesty; or the unknowability of other people or of oneself (Albee: ‘I think that's foolishness on the part of the [writer] to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.’); or what happens when one of the partners in the shared fantasy of a relationship questions or loses faith in the agreement, spoken or unspoken; or the dangers of knowing too much about someone; or the resilience and fragility of the fictionalized stories we create and tell ourselves about how our profoundly unknowable pasts and how they inform our illusion of the present and project into the imaginary future.
"45 Years is concerned with all of that and more. But for me (and this isn't a spoiler because the film's climax is exquisitely ambiguous) the most powerful emotional undertow consists of the current unwelcome feelings and doubts that people can resist but can't overcome. They're caught up in the current and, despite their best efforts, they can't go back to where they were before. They know they don't have any legitimate or rational reason for their emotions, but that doesn't change them, and they castigate themselves (and, perhaps, their partner) for stirring up such anguish. It's an absurd and tragicomic dilemma. And it makes for a captivating experience at the movies.” ~ Jim Emerson
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