Butler's Cinema Scene

Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay

“45 YEARS” My rating: B+

95 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Everyone has a few secrets. Usually it’s a case of no harm, no foul.

But for the couple at the center of Andrew Haigh’s “45 Years,” long-kept secrets threaten a decades-old marriage.

Kate (Oscar nominated Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) are retirees living in a bucolic and green corner of England. They’ve never had children, doting instead on a series of dogs. They are comfortable and reasonably happy.

One day the postman brings a letter that upends their placid existence. Geoff learns that melting glaciers have revealed the body of his long-ago girlfriend, who was hiking Europe with him when she fell to her death in an alpine crevasse. Now, more than 50 years later, the authorities want him to come settle matters.

Kate knew of this shadowy woman only vaguely. Geoff has never talked much about her. But now she learns that way back then Geoff identified himself to the authorities as the dead woman’s husband. Actually they never married, but as far as the Swiss police are concerned, he’s still next of kin.

This revelation gnaws at Kate as she goes about arranging a party to celebrate her and Geoff’s 45th wedding anniversary (Geoff was ill for their 40th, so this is to make up for lost time).

But even as she must deal with renting  a banquet hall, selecting music for the dance, and creating a menu, she’s gnawed by doubts.

Just how well does she know this man who has shared her life?

Charlotte Rampling

The marvel of Haigh’s screenplay lies in its ambiguity.  It’s not like Geoff is some great conniver, or that he’s inherently dishonest. But Kate’s sleuthing uncovers a couple of shocking revelations that suggest that this long-gone love meant far more to her husband than she ever suspected…so much that he kept virtually all of it to himself.

That, in fact, Kate was never the great love of his life.

The more you think about the story Hiagh lays out,  the more there is to chew on. For example, there’s the male/female dynamic and whether some of us (mostly men) are genetically and culturally predisposed to keep things hidden. (It’s like the old joke: When a woman trusts a man she’ll confide in him her deepest thoughts and hopes.  When a man trusts a woman he’ll break wind in front of her.)

And then there are Kate and Geoff’s respective careers.  She was a teacher, a profession built on the sharing of ideas.  He was in business, where knowing how to keep secrets can be the difference between profit and loss.

But that’s just frosting. The cake here is the performances — particularly Rampling’s near-heartbreaking turn as a woman who begins to doubt the essentials of her life. The actress has one astonishing wordless scene in which she scours the storage attic for clues to her husband’s first love and comes up with way more than she bargained for.

What’s wonderful about all this is the lack of hysterics. These are mature, smart people not given to overemoting.  Their seething emotions — well, hers at least — are revealed in tiny tells: the pursing of the lips, a quiver of the eyelid. No need to chew scenery to get Kate’s anguish across.

| Robert W. Butler