https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/how-to-be-together-on-andrew-haighs-45-years
How to Be Together: On Andrew Haigh's "45 Years" by Francey Russell
45 YEARS, the new film by Andrew Haigh, takes place over the course of five days, beginning with the arrival of a letter and ending with the titular anniversary party of Geoff (Tom Courtenay) and Kate (Charlotte Rampling). On the first day, Kate returns home from her routine morning walk with the dog to find Geoff with a letter, written in German, about a woman who died nearly five decades earlier. The dead woman is Katya: she was Geoff's girlfriend before Geoff met Kate, she died when she and Geoff were in Switzerland, and her body has just now been found, frozen intact in the Alps. Geoff and Kate are smart, sensible people: initially, Kate is sympathetic to Geoff's loss and belated closure, and Geoff is careful not to dwell so much as to make Kate uncomfortable. When asked if she is upset by the news, Kate replies, "I can hardly be cross with something that happened before I existed."
We later learn that Geoff was Kate's first serious relationship. When Geoff speaks about what it was like to suddenly lose Katya down the side of the mountain, Kate recalls that she lost her mother around the same time; while Geoff was out in the world with a lover, Kate was still at home with her parents. Her first residence outside her family home was her first house with Geoff. Kate's entire adult life — her independence, her sexuality, her mature development, her German shepherds — coincides completely with her life with Geoff. But Geoff's adult life does not coincide with Kate's. There was a time before with Katya. At one point he wistfully describes that time in the mountains as a time when days were purposeful without a purpose: there was always something to do, but no concerns beyond the immediate. A self-contained world of two. A few days after the letter arrives, as both characters begin to show the strain of containing a past preserved in ice that has not felt the wear of time, Kate asks Geoff as they lay in their bed: "If she hadn't died would you have married her?" Geoff says yes: "We would have gotten married."
More: https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/how-to-be-together-on-andrew-haighs-45-years
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg5cpiX18TA
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives.
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