A long-held secret threatens to upend the marriage of a septuagenarian English couple in the days leading up to the celebration of their 45th wedding anniversary. If I tell you just that synopsis, you likely have a guess or two about the nature of this film’s revelations. But it’s not exactly what you’re thinking. 45 Years is subtler than that.
It begins with the arrival of a letter to Geoff (Tom Courtenay), from which he learns that the body of his former girlfriend has been found in a glacier on a Swiss mountaintop. She’s been frozen in the ice, frozen in time just as she was at age 27, since the accident that claimed her life more than 50 years earlier.
Kate (Charlotte Rampling, justifiably nominated for an Oscar for this performance) has previously heard only scant details about the woman her husband loved before they met. As the news triggers in Geoff an onslaught of memories and reflections upon his advanced age, Kate at first attempts to temper her own mixed feelings to be supportive of him.
However, it soon becomes clear that not only does Geoff’s heart still yearn for this other woman, but also that important decisions in their own marriage were shaped by what happened decades before. The question becomes whether the flood of emotions that lay buried beneath the surface for so long might wash away the meaning of the life they’ve built together.
