DVD Review: 45 Years

★★★★☆

Haigh adapted David Constantine’s sliver of a story In Another Country himself, and it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine the screenplay feeling equally as light. The drama here comes not from verbosity or the back and forth of arguments, but in silence and words unspoken. Much has been left unsaid for decades it transpires when a letter arrives for Geoff Mercer (Courtenay) in the days leading up to the anniversary bash for he and his wife Kate (Rampling). The letter is from the Swiss authorities informing Geoff that his former girlfriend, Katya, who fell to her death in the mountains before he and Kate met, has now been discovered in the ice. This spellbinding image of his lost love staring through time at Geoff is a beautifully tragic one, and one that suddenly casts an icy pall over the Mercer household.

While it is Geoff who is initially shaken up by this news, it is Kate with whom Haigh leaves his camera, regarding her as she tries to comfort and empathise before the looming shadow of Katya begins to descend between them. After so long, there is a threat that their marriage will not make it until the next weekend, let alone the next celebratory milestone. Rampling is exquisite. Still and watchful, she quietly tries to hold herself together while the last half century, and her happy but childless marriage, is suddenly cast in a different light be Geoff’s lingering commitment. He is overcome by the notion of his own age, when comparing himself to the pretty, blonde twenty-something he imagines before him – like a ghostly mid-life crisis mingled with the befuddlement of a wave of grief breaking free of a long frozen shoreline.

Each day begins with a title card, giving the approach of their impending party an unsettling sense thriller-esque quality, and film exists in a state of slowly-ratcheting tension whose only release can be Kate’s forgiveness of Geoff’s transgressions. Her foray into the attic, however, a universal symbol of the past if ever there was one, is delivered with such shattering emotional power – and deliberate filmmaking savvy – that treatment for what ails them may already be out of reach. The rural Norfolk setting suggests a landscape of minimal upheaval, but it amplifies the poignancy of this tightly drawn drama that, much like Geoff’s letter, will get under the skin and stick with you for days and weeks to come.