Review of "45 Years"

For a film about a marriage slowly but surely tumbling out of control, it's astonishing, and something of a coup, how assured and precise Andrew Haigh's "45 Years" is. It's a film which doesn't so much ape as embody the spirit of a cinematic mathematician like Haneke, where every shot feels fine-tuned for effect, every angle maximising some important aspect- or throwing us a red herring. A work of some kind of mastery, basically. 

All this would be for naught if it was in service of nonsense, or worse, something meaningless, but luckily "45 Years" has an emotional reach to meet its technical precision, and is mining deep thematic wellsprings of ambiguous but bold feeling. 

Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Jeff (Tom Courtenay) have been married for 45 years. We start the film on a Monday- their anniversary party is on Saturday. Their events organiser observes how that's an odd number of years to celebrate, and Kate informs him they would have had it five years ago but Jeff was unwell. You feel that waiting until the 50th anniversary wasn't an option. There's a lot to celebrate.  

In that same scene, the organiser also points out that the room in which they're celebrating has a rich history, like any marriage. It was even home to the celebrations of the Battle of Trafalgar. "Didn't Nelson die in the Battle of Trafalgar?" Kate knowingly probes. The organiser replies yes, but a victory like that is worth celebrating. 

This is a clever piece of offhand dialogue that in a lesser film would simply set the stage for the upcoming jaunt, but here outlines and echoes the entire themes of the film. Earlier that day, Jeff had received a letter from Germany saying that the body had been found. "My Katia", he says. Kate looks on in worry. We find out that Katia was somebody Jeff was with many years ago. They were climbing a mountain, and one day- she was gone, with nothing but a scream (Jeff's description of that scream is one of the most evocative and perfect pieces of perfectly delivered dialogue you could choose to hear). 

But now her body has been unearthed, frozen, and perfectly preserved, which is fitting, because her presence is felt by both Kate and Jeff for the remainder of the film.

There's not much more to the plot itself, and the film explores the ways in which this revelation impacts them in the run-up to a party in honour of their love. 

Jeff responds by becoming distant and vague. Not there. He starts to research climate change and becomes intensely interested in how people can be preserved in ice. Kate expresses interest in all of this (with reservations, such as her gentle dissuading of Jeff going to Switzerland to see the body), but soon it seems like this has impacted her in more ways than even she thought. Is she jealous? She can't be jealous of something that happened before (although, we learn, not too long before) Kate came into Jeff's life.  

However, Kate knows Jeff, and we can see she senses something's off. Why is he being so mournful over something that happened so long ago? The narrative screws are inevitably tightened and whilst there are late in the day revelations, they are delivered subtly, for us to consider for ourselves, instead of being told how to feel. 

The film succeeds so brilliantly because of many reasons. Haigh's screenplay, in a very short space of time and in some quite restrictive conditions (about 85% of the film is just conversations between the pair, or Kate on her own), manages to draw the outline of an entire marriage. We sense their love through small conversations only old married couples can have, such as Kate's quiet surprise that Jeff is reading Kierkegaard again. "You have three editions of that book, but I don't think you've ever got past the final chapter." 

The acting is another reason why the film is successful. Where others might play it with an eye to melodrama, Rampling and Courtenay do the opposite. If this is the tale of a marriage falling apart, and I leave that up to you to decide, it's a marriage imploding as opposed to exploding. The sense of routine and order brilliantly established in the first two scenes doesn't dissipate throughout the whole film. Nobody shouts, and lines are delivered with the true emotions implied, not stated. Only two masters of their craft could convincingly pull this off, and there's enough evidence here to suggest that that's just what these two are. Talk has been had of an Oscar nomination for Rampling; she deserves it. Every aspect of her performance is controlled, and studied, to perfection. Every pause, intonation, and look seems utterly natural but tells us something words can't. 

Then there's the filmmaking itself. Largely composed of static shots just observing the dialogue being spoken, the film plays with placing and framing to tell us things and give us clues. Look at how Kate tends to be placed nearest the camera, or how many shots there are that show Kate side-on, looking left or right. The film is studying her. It wants us to feel her feelings, in close up. It's an extraordinary example of cinematic empathy. Her feelings become ours. 

That's it. There's music, but it comes from characters playing it, as opposed to a non-diegetic soundtrack. There are no fireworks, no drama, no explosions. Just a gentle thawing, like the ice that has preserved Katia, and a trickle that becomes a stream that slowly becomes a jet of feeling. The characters try their best to contain it, but it's there. Whatever happens by the end of this film, and it's left open to debate, things have been altered in unforeseeable ways. Haigh, Rampling and Courtenay are masters of their craft. 

Review of Last Orders (2001)

"Last Orders", Fred Schepisi's 2001 film about a group of very old friends travelling to Margate to scatter the ashes of their friend Jack (Michael Caine), based on the novel by Graham Swift, is an accomplished, good looking, verbally expansive film, acted to perfection, that suffers from near-terminal preciousness. I loved so many aspects of this film, the performances, the look, the stunning dialogue, but it is sentimental to the point of suffocation, and it feels hermetically sealed. Nothing can get into this film.

The performers involved are almost like a who's who of the top brass of British acting talent; Bob Hoskins plays Ray, who we sense was probably closest to Jack; Ray Winstone plays his son Vince, who always disappointed Jack by not going into his butchers business; Tom Courtenay plays Vic, who's the most peaceable member of the group; and David Hemmings plays Lenny, the one of them all who's the biggest sucker for a pint.

Helen Mirren also plays Jack's wife Amy; she doesn't come with the boys to scatter his ashes, instead staying at home to visit their severely disabled daughter June, who Jack has never wanted anything to do with. Theirs was not an unhappy marriage, but we sense that at some point after June's birth their marriage forked, and they spent large parts of it walking side by side but down two different roads.

The whole film is told through an interplay of flashback and the present day, but with flashbacks sometimes leading back to different flashbacks and the flashbacks coming forward not always to the present. Any narrative ambiguities are quelled by good makeup work and well-chosen younger actors who resemble the main stalwarts in motion and gesture if not in the face itself. So we see this old group meet each other, fight in the war together, get married together, and so on. It's a lovely if astoundingly obvious setup.

And it is in the flashbacks that the films preciousness begins to drag it down. There is nothing revealed in them that one could not attempt to decipher simply by watching the first 20 minutes and figuring out the relationships between the characters. For a film dealing ostensibly with grief and the measurement of what your life has been worth in its sum achievements and relationships, it all feels hopelessly safe, more than a little staid. There are the requisite reveals, the conflicts, the ultimate reconciliation with peace, and... What then? It just ends.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on the film;maybe I am expecting more; but I honestly cannot stress the calibre of the technical qualities enough, and the acting alone almost warrants watching it. But they are all in service of a flimsy piece of fluff that has nothing much to say about the subjects that its dealing with; it's almost as if it was directed to Radiohead's maxim of "no alarms and no surprises, please".