Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling (Agatha A. Nitecka. © 45 Years Films Ltd. A Sundance Selects Release)

By DCist contributor Mark Lieberman

The gorgeous opening shots of 45 Years linger long into the movie’s trim 95-minute runtime. First, an ultra-wide shot of a small farm on the English countryside, the enormous sky a dull shade of blue. Then a woman, trotting down a paved road lined with leafless trees, a dog panting alongside. Birds chirp, but otherwise: silence.

This tender opening foreshadows the film that follows, with small details and subtle gestures that suggest the grander ideas left unspoken. Not much in the way of incident transpires. Conversations rarely rise above the mundane. But in the absence of overt profundity, writer-director Andrew Haigh unearths keenly felt moments of reflection, curiosity, and regret.

The woman walking her dog is Kate Mercer, played by Charlotte Rampling, now a deserving Oscar nominee for this understated but towering performance. Rampling’s face and body language tell you all you need to know about Kate. She’s dignified, intelligent, passionate, and occasionally quite sad. She’s seen almost everything at least once.

She’s married to Geoff (Tom Courtenay), who’s quiet like Kate, but buries his emotions deep below a veneer of casualness. At the start of the film, their 45th anniversary is a week away. Preparations for a lavish dinner party are already underway. Kate ruefully tells the mail carrier there’s much to be done. She doesn’t yet realize how right she is.

Geoff opens the mail that morning to find a letter that makes him sit up in his chair. The body of a woman named Katya, whom he had befriended shortly before he met and married Kate, has been found in the Alps, preserved in an accidental tomb of ice. No one says so, but it’s clear that Katya doesn’t come up in conversation much in the Mercer household, and maybe hasn’t crossed Geoff’s mind for many years. But the shock and terror on Courtenay’s face show that it all comes rushing back in an instant.

The rest of the film waits patiently for tension to boil over. It never quite does, at least in the way you expect. Kate and Geoff talk about Katya sometimes, but other times they let her silently hang over the conversation. Geoff starts wandering into town so often that Kate becomes suspicious. Perhaps Katya wasn’t who Geoff had said she was long ago. Perhaps Geoff and Kate both forgot what they knew about Katya. The memories are muddled.

This plot description would suggest a movie that explores Geoff reaching back in his mind, gradually dredging up his feelings and spilling them all over the Mercer anniversary. But in his short filmmaking career, Haigh has made a point to sidestep stories told from conventional perspectives. In his HBO series Looking, he followed four gay men as they navigated romantic turmoil like heterosexual people experience on television all the time. His previous film Weekend also explored nuances of a gay relationship.

Here, the focus is on Kate, an almost-elderly woman of the type whose stories often get shuffled to the side. What’s happening to Geoff is of importance only in its impact on Kate. Haigh has found a thespian ideally suited to his style, which is to let the image and the performer do what dialogue rarely can. There’s a novel of recollections and emotions in every word Rampling says to Geoff; every glance at the sky; every sigh, groan, and pause.

Courtenay is no slouch either. Geoff gets a jolt at the beginning, and that jolt’s effect on Kate sets in slowly as the anniversary party nears. Haigh’s visual and verbal restraint throws the performers into the most flattering possible focus. There are no flashbacks to explain, underline, and highlight Geoff’s description of his adventures with Katya, or Kate and Geoff’s first meeting. There’s almost no music, as if to mirror the Mercers struggling to hear something other than their own thoughts. There are close-ups, but many of the movie’s most intimate moments take place in wide shot, at a short distance from the couple, suggesting that there’s no more knowledge to be gained from getting closer.

What’s left is a movie with lovely scenery, two characters so fully realized as to seem lifelike, and moments that inspire tears of recognition. Fittingly, the last scene is on the anniversary, which marks time for good and ill. 45 Years ends with some words, then some tears, marking four and a half decades of companionship and a week of complex uncertainty. From the latter, Haigh conveys the passionate, confusing, murky depths of the former.

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45 Years
Written and directed by Andrew Haigh
Based on a short story by David Constantine
With Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine James
Rated R for language and brief sexuality
95 minutes
Opens today at Landmark Bethesda Row