861 45 Years

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ianungstad
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861 45 Years

#1 Post by ianungstad » Thu Feb 12, 2015 3:00 pm

45 Years

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In this exquisitely calibrated film by Andrew Haigh, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay perform a subtly off-kilter pas de deux as Kate and Geoff, an English couple who, on the eve of an anniversary celebration, find their long marriage shaken by the arrival of a letter to Geoff that unceremoniously collapses his past into their shared present. Haigh carries the tradition of British realist cinema to artful new heights in 45 Years, weaving the momentous into the mundane as the pair go about their daily lives, while the evocatively flat, wintry Norfolk landscape frames their struggle to maintain an increasingly untenable status quo. Loosely adapting a short story by David Constantine, Haigh shifts the focus from the slightly erratic Geoff to Kate, eliciting a remarkable, nuanced portrayal by Rampling of a woman's gradual metamorphosis from unflappable wife to woman undone.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED EDITION:

• High-definition digital transfer, supervised by director Andrew Haigh, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary featuring Haigh and producer Tristan Goligher
• New documentary featuring interviews with Haigh, Goligher, actors Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, editor Jonathan Alberts, and director of photography Lol Crawley
• New interview with David Constantine, author of the short story on which the film is based
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Ella Taylor

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johnnysnatchclub7
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#2 Post by johnnysnatchclub7 » Thu Feb 12, 2015 3:04 pm

ianungstad wrote:IFC has picked up the rights to Andrew Haigh's 45 Years which is getting fantastic reviews at the Berlin Film Festival. Considering Criterion has already released Weekend; this will probably land in the collection too.
Great news! I love WEEKEND and I love "Looking". More Rampling in the Collection is always welcome as well.

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Re: The Films of 2015

#3 Post by ianthemovie » Sat Jan 23, 2016 8:35 pm

Andrew Haigh's 45 Years is superb--an intimate and emotionally rich portrait of a long-married couple looking back over their relationship. It's rare to see a film that is so honest about the doubts and uncertainties that can lurk within any long-term relationship. It's made all the more powerful by the fact that they do genuinely seem to love each other, but that this doesn't foreclose other nagging thoughts about how their lives might have turned out differently if they had married other people or made other choices.

I was floored by both Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay (who isn't getting as much attention, possibly because the film privileges Rampling's POV, but who is equally great). Between this and Weekend, Andrew Haigh is shaping up to be a phenomenal writer-director, a worthy successor to the great British realist filmmakers of the previous generation like Mike Leigh.

Some thoughts on the ending:
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I had heard a lot about how great the final shot was--without knowing what it was--so when I saw it I think I was a bit initially confused/let down. My first thought was that Rampling's final wounded gesture (pulling her hand away from Courtenay's) seemed unnecessary. Then I started thinking about the lyrics of the song, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," which is playing as they dance at the anniversary party, and how she may be suddenly reading her own experience into the song in a way that she never had before, which is what causes her to experience a new form of pain. "They asked me how I knew / My true love was true... / So I chaffed them and I gaily laughed / To think they would doubt our love... / Now laughing friends deride / Tears I cannot hide / So I smile and say / When a lovely flame dies / Smoke gets in your eyes." The lyrics would seem to apply to Kate (Rampling) as a woman who, until recently, was blind to the fact that her husband was perhaps still in love with his old girlfriend. Now, quite literally, she has come to see that girlfriend (in the form of the photograph and the slides) and what she meant to her husband. As a song about love and illusion/disillusion, it seems to apply to Kate and Geoff's situation.

I'd be curious to hear if others read this differently, or if others took something similar away from the ending. It also seems important that, immediately before the song, Geoff has given a somewhat awkward but heartfelt speech (causing him to cry), which appears to make Kate happy/relieved/affirmed. Then the song happens and she appears just as unmoored as she was before. This would indicate that it really is hearing the song itself that crushes her and precipitates that final gesture. "Their" song has been ruined, another example of how Katya's death continues to send little reverberating aftershocks through the marriage (and will perhaps continue to do so). I suppose a more properly sentimental film would have ended with the heartfelt speech. Instead, that coda adds an ironic and devastating twist that I can't stop thinking about.

It occurs to me that Haigh sets up that song right from the very first scene of the film, when Kate is humming it to herself while walking the dog/coming inside the house! A brilliant framing device.

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ianthemovie
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#4 Post by ianthemovie » Sun Feb 21, 2016 5:12 pm

I've got to assume that 45 Years is a near-certainty since Criterion posted one of their closet videos with Andrew Haigh and Charlotte Rampling a couple of months ago.

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Ribs
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#5 Post by Ribs » Mon Mar 28, 2016 12:17 pm

45 Years is being put out by Paramount in June - guess it'll be a while before CC gets around to it, if ever.

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Re: Criterion and IFC

#6 Post by RSTooley » Tue Mar 29, 2016 8:29 am

Ribs wrote:45 Years is being put out by Paramount in June - guess it'll be a while before CC gets around to it, if ever.
I'm sure that, like Clouds of Sils Maria and Boyhood, 45 Years will eventually see a Criterion release. Criterion has been notorious for sitting on projects for years, so IFC has been using Paramount as their home media placeholder for those who don't necessarily want the heavily supplemented special edition. I'm not worried in the least.

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Ribs
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Re: Criterion and IFC

#7 Post by Ribs » Tue Mar 29, 2016 9:12 am

Clouds of Sils Maria wasn't released by Paramount on BD in the US. I'm not quite sure that 45 Years has a wide-enough appeal to do a BD double-dip in a year or two like Boyhood.

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Swift
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Re: 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

#8 Post by Swift » Tue Aug 30, 2016 10:54 pm

I enjoyed this intimate, well acted film, but I have to say I don't think I bought the central premise of it. After 45 years of marriage, the idea that a person would feel jealous towards a person their partner had feelings for before they ever met seems somewhat ludicrous to me. I would imagine the shared experience of those 45 years would heavily negate the 1-2 years of the prior relationship.

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tenia
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Re: 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

#9 Post by tenia » Wed Aug 31, 2016 2:11 am

I think the central premise simply is like Gwen Stacy in the Spider Man mythology : the girl the male protagonist turns out never to move on from. Rampling isn't so much really jealous than taken aback by the fact she never realised that before, or that her husband never told her anything about it. Part of it might be jealousy, but part of it certainly is anger at her husband for hiding this for so long. Human feelings are also pretty irrational when it comes to posteriori judgments so I wasn't especially surprised / puzzled.
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Remember also that he got the girl pregnant and never told Rampling about it. It doesn't help.
About the song towards the end, I've been surprised a couple would choose a song with such lyrics as their song !

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Re: 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

#10 Post by bakofalltrades » Wed Aug 31, 2016 11:17 am

After 45 years of marriage, the idea that a person would feel jealous towards a person their partner had feelings for before they ever met seems somewhat ludicrous to me. I would imagine the shared experience of those 45 years would heavily negate the 1-2 years of the prior relationship.
As a counterpoint, I'd offer that *he's* certainly not behaving like it was some minor relationship from a long-forgotten past.
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His habits and behaviors start to change; he admits that he and Katya were more or less engaged—that he would have married her if had the chance; and he's waking up at night to rummage in the attic for mementos and keepsakes. It's an upheaval that, I feel, understandably and inevitably stirs up feelings of inadequacy in Kate. I got the impression he was very deeply in love with Katya, and perhaps still is.

But that's not *all* that Kate is responding to, is it? I don't think she's jealous of his affection for Katya, per se; rather, I think it's his behavior and the way he's divulging (and even still *withholding*) certain key things about his past that are casting a shadow over the entire course of Kate and Geoff's marriage.

For instance, we learn that Kate and Geoff have no children. If I recall correctly, this was a decision on their part. As a woman who teaches, and who seems to be fondly remembered by at least some of her students (given the interaction between her and a former student at the start of the film), it's fair to question how much her own desire for children might have been sacrificed as a matter of compromise for the sake of the marriage. To then later find out that Katya was pregnant—that at one point Geoff *did* intend to have and raise a child... I think it's a curdling revelation for Kate.

Geoff seems to have suppressed a great deal about his relationship with Katya and its far-reaching effects on him. It's not at all unfair, to my mind, that Kate should feel like a large part of the equation was withheld from her when they agreed to not have children. And if that's the case, what corner of their relationship is free of the lingering feelings that Geoff's been harboring all these years? Which parts of their marriage (indeed, of the life they spent together) were truly and solely theirs alone—just the two of them? (The title itself seems open to interpretation: 45 years of marriage, sure, but then also 45 years of marriage to someone who never quite compared to Katya.)

It's a ghost story, really.

I think it's this doubt (and the subsequent re-appraisal of how she's spent her life) that cuts more closely to what Kate's grappling with throughout the film—not just jealousy.

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Re: 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

#11 Post by Roscoe » Wed Aug 31, 2016 12:05 pm

45 YEARS later, he still refers to her as "my Katya."

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Re: 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

#12 Post by Roger Ryan » Wed Aug 31, 2016 12:44 pm

The film (and, I imagine, the original short story the film is based on) is strongly influenced by Joyce's The Dead, which became the source material for John Huston's final feature in 1987. Like with the Joyce story, the wounding aspect for Kate is the realization that she doesn't know her spouse the way she thought she did.
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There is every possibility that the couple have stayed in the marriage out of inertia; that the marriage is something comfortable and that the lack of passion is accepted because both partners appear to believe that passion is not an important aspect of a relationship. This arrangement becomes unbalanced when the truth of Geoff's passion for another woman is revealed. The pretense is destroyed and the expected anniversary speech just underlines the falsity Kate has been living under. The use of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" is a superb touch, but the real punch line is how the opening line of the Moody Blues' "Go Now" is used under the final close-up of Kate: "We've already said goodbye..."

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tenia
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Re: 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

#13 Post by tenia » Wed Aug 31, 2016 1:37 pm

That was also my initial feeling : it's not so much jealousy than the feeling her husband is suddenly taking away all the comfort they discreetly built over the years. There was a bubble of ease and routine and stillness, and now it's gone in a very short time.

It might also have to do with the memories of Katya and shown to her. They're all specific about some kind of rather exotic eventful adventures with twists and all, while the Geoff she knows seems the opposite of that. It seems he's opening more thanks to these memories surfacing back than by anything she tried to achieve over 45 years, bringing an understandable feeling of emotional failure.

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Re: Forthcoming: 45 Years

#14 Post by domino harvey » Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:16 pm

Will this be the first Criterion IFC release to already have a stateside Blu-Ray?

EDIT: Nevermind, forgot about Boyhood!

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Re: Forthcoming: 45 Years

#15 Post by pzadvance » Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:18 pm

domino harvey wrote:Will this be the first Criterion IFC release to already have a stateside Blu-Ray?
Boyhood also, no?

EDIT: Yep, just saw your edit

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Re: Forthcoming: 45 Years

#16 Post by domino harvey » Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:20 pm

Yeah, I realized that right after submitting! Still, this one will presumably be coming out in a much smaller window to the last Blu-Ray than that one!

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Ribs
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Re: Forthcoming: 45 Years

#17 Post by Ribs » Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:39 pm

Well, I can't imagine this will be a super strong seller considering it already was released but I suppose it was never likely to be one anyway.

And I guess this also means we should still expect Criterion to be putting out pretty much every high-profile IFC titles eventually anyway, so your Wieners and Weiner-Dogs as well as the slew of Cannes stuff are now far more likely in my book (as I had assumed 45 Years wasn't coming, I thought everything else was somehow off the table too)

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Re: Forthcoming: 45 Years

#18 Post by FrauBlucher » Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:48 pm

Much like Boyhood, maybe it got a Paramount release to take advantage of Oscar buzz created from the Charlotte Rampling nom.

ianungstad
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Re: Forthcoming: 45 Years

#19 Post by ianungstad » Fri Sep 30, 2016 5:28 pm

Wiener won't happen. It was released by MPI and not a major studio. MPI titles are usually ones that Criterion passed over.

Weiner-Dog though...almost certainly to be forthcoming.

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Re: 861 45 Years

#20 Post by swo17 » Thu Dec 15, 2016 5:04 pm

Coming in March

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Ribs
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Re: 861 45 Years

#21 Post by Ribs » Thu Dec 15, 2016 5:06 pm

It's, er, a little surprising this is the special edition that took extra time considering it's still not exactly a ton of material.

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Re: 861 45 Years

#22 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Dec 15, 2016 5:10 pm

Seems like substantial material, though. I'll take quality over quantity any time.

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Ribs
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Re: 861 45 Years

#23 Post by Ribs » Tue Jan 31, 2017 9:59 pm


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Re: 861 45 Years

#24 Post by Ribs » Mon Feb 06, 2017 1:29 am


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Roscoe
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Re: 861 45 Years

#25 Post by Roscoe » Wed Mar 08, 2017 10:03 am

Got the Blu-ray and was blown away all over again -- a splendid transfer of a fine film. Haven't explored the extras yet. The essay on the insert seems rather curious to me, in that the author doesn't seem to recognize the sound effect that is heard over the opening credits, describing it as a series of clicks, rather than the sound of a slide projector.

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