Movie Review: 45 Years (English)

45 Years

When you are with someone for a good 45 years (gosh, that's a long time, isn't it?), the general expectation is that you know all that has to be known about the other person. You know their likes, their dislikes, and you have learned to live around their failings, flaws and weaknesses. And this is especially true if the other turns out to be your significant other, the person whom you are married to.

Writer-director Andrew Haigh's 45 Years, adapted from a short story In Another Country written by David Constantine, examines this very dynamic of a well-off retired couple (a superlative Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay) who are about to celebrate their forty-fifth wedding anniversary, but are forced to confront an unpleasant past when the husband receives a missive bearing a startling piece of news that the ice-encased body of his first love Katya, who died more than 50 years ago in a hiking mishap in the Swiss Alps, has been found.

This unexpected monkey wrench thrown in the midst of them, fairly innocuous at first, gives the marriage-under-duress domestic drama a whole new twist, slowly building tension as Katya becomes the only thing Kate and Geoff, the said couple, talk about in the days leading to their anniversary, cracking open fissures in their rock-solid relationship, eventually distorting and transforming their perspective of the life they have had together all this time, as it accelerates towards a Phoenix-like heart-stopping dramatic high.