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“Suddenly … there’s a shadow hanging over me Oh, yesterday came suddenly. Why she had to go, I don’t know she wouldn’t say. I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.” Lennon/McCartney (1965)
Many films about marriage use the affair as a lynchpin to address betrayal and the subsequent unraveling of a relationship. 45 Years (Haigh and Goligher, 2015) tweaks this conceit while courting the complications of a blurred temporality when unmetabolized memories from a long gone romance detonate the present moment.
The film begins innocuously enough with a woman, Kate (Charlotte Rampling), walking her hound along a bucolic country path. There’s a fork in the road, one that foreshadows the breech in her marriage that’s looming.
The childless Mercers, Kate and her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), are about to celebrate their 45 years of wedded life. They’re in the kitchen and Kate is chatting up the musical playlist for the anniversary party, when a luminal event occurs. Geoff has received a letter, written in German. He’s dumbstruck, mumbling something about recognizing the nouns not the verbs, capturing something about language dismembered from use, but more importantly signaling something about the discontinuity in Geoff’s psyche. Only naming words, not action words, are recalled emblematic of a fixed, motionless mind.
The letter states that Katya, Geoff’s girlfriend from his youth, who died by falling into a fissure on a hiking trip in the Swiss Alps, has been found. Geoff is contacted because he’s presumed to be the next of kin. Due to global warming, the snow has melted revealing her preserved, frozen body, and she is expected to look just as she did on the day she died. The frozen corpse is yet another apt metaphor for Geoff’s immobilized, suspended psyche.
Although Kate knew of the existence of Katya, that is, she knew the facts of the woman who died before she and Geoff even met, she hadn’t really known anything about their relationship—certainly not the depth of m