45 Years (2015, Andrew Haigh) is one of those films that stayed with me long after I viewed it. What the film does so well is offer us an existential crisis that sinks in even deeper than for just one individual. The one individual is Kate (Charlotte Rampling), who gradually comes to realize that her husband Geoff (Tom Courtenay) has never gotten over the one lost love of his life, his “Katya.” The emphasis on “his” is important, because early on, when Geoff first discovers that his lost love’s body has been finally discovered, 50 years after it was lost, he even slips and says that to Kate, “my Katya,” as if 50 years removed from her hasn’t meant a thing Katya was such an integral part of his very being. In this way, we can see how despite “45 years” together, the “ghost” of Katya has always been with them, to such a degree that Kate was never entirely “enough” for Geoff, more like a replacement, or worse, a proxy for his lost Katya, who, like her preserved body, is preserved as part of his being, e.g., a relationship not lived but forever always desired. The deeper implications of this are profound.
**Spoilers coming!!**
“Pure” Katya
When Geoff first learns that Katya’s body has been discovered, what Geoff says is just so telling. He says that her body has been “perfectly preserved,” “like something in the freezer.” And then he says, “And I look like this,” as if finding her somehow brings her back into being and back to him but then that also means that he can’t measure up to her. Further, he calls the water “pure,” seeming to associate Katya with an exaggerated “purity,” suggesting that he has fetishized Katya, making her an ideal that she couldn’t possibly have lived up to. Indeed, even Geoff says that she may have been flirting with their guide, suggesting that perhaps she wasn’t as into Geoff as he was into her.
Moreover, Geoff doesn’t just seem to idealize Katya herself but their relationship and what their time together meant to him. In an interesting and telling exchange, we get this:
Geoff: “When you know what your purpose is? When every day seems to have some point to it? Finding somewhere to stay, finding food. And there were days we didn’t go anywhere, they seemed just as purposeful as when we set out in complete seriousness at 4:00 in the fucking morning. I think that’s the worst part of getting decrepit…losing that…purposefulness. I was remembering today how we used to see these flowers. Some sort of violet, I think they were. They’d find a patch of grass where the snow had melted. They’d just spring up. I know they were only flowers, but they seemed so determined. Brave even. And that’s how I see Katya and me. Wandering around, turning our backs on civilization….
Kate: Brave?
Geoff: In a way. Don’t you think?
Kate: Not Really.
Geoff: Why Not?
Kate: I mean, what were you actually doing? You’re just climbing up some bloody mountain.
Geoff: Well, I’m not saying what we did was out of bravery.
Kate: I think you were just chasing a girl who wanted to be chased.
Geoff (obviously put off by Kate’s response): You didn’t know her.
Kate: No, I didn’t.
Geoff (now not wanting to talk about Katya to Kate): I’m tired.
After this exchange, Kate asks Geoff if he would have married Katya “for real” had she not died, and he says yes, his look after this (see below) really speaking volumes as he slips into a kind of catatonic contemplation of what he desires. More to the point of this above exchange, we can begin to see in this moment just how deep Geoff’s love and obsession for Katya goes, Geoff’s remembrance of this moment crystallizing how Katya and their adventure together was perhaps the last time he felt he had “purpose” in his life, making Katya a representation of more than just a lover/romantic companion but personifying a whole way of thinking and being, “brave” adventurers living life to its fullest, with purpose and how that intersects with a profound connection to each other. That Katya died instead of living and inevitably reducing this moment to a romantic blip in their overall relationship — even if they had gone on to marry (assuming Geoff is telling the truth and they really weren’t married!) — makes this moment even more ideal than it otherwise would have been, something poor Kate can not compete with in Geoff’s overdetermined imagination. When Kate reduces this moment to the “ordinary” (Kate’s own jealousy coming to the surface here), Geoff immediately withdraws from interacting with Kate, not wanting his romantic and imaginary vision of what was with Katya be tainted.
After this exchange, Kate tells Geoff that she can’t talk about Katya anymore, which is understandable considering that Geoff talks about his lost love in a way that understandably makes Kate more and more uncomfortable, since he speaks about her in a way that suggests he has kept her a part of him for all these decades, never letting time let her slip away to at least a healthy place in his memory.
Geoff’s Mourning
What also seems so clear is that when he learns of the discovery of her body, it seems to re-inflame his feeling of loss, Geoff than beginning to go into what clearly seems to be a period of mourning for Katya. This manifests in different ways, beginning almost immediately as Geoff insists that Kate go on with her plans, my sense being that this desire by Geoff isn’t so much him telling Kate that he is fine but that he wants her to leave so he can do a bee line to the attic to be with with Katya.
Further, in one striking moment, Geoff has met Kate for lunch and he is talking about climate change — that which has created the conditions to make possible finding Katya’s body — and two friends of theirs stop by, much to Geoff’s obvious annoyance. In this moment, we can see that all Geoff wants to do is talk about his lost Katya, even to the point of that which is associated with her, in this case climate change, and when their friends stop by, he can only see it as an intrusion on his need to focus on Katya.
We also see his distinct mourning of Katya in other ways, including him starting to smoke again, his morose demeanor and him slipping into interior contemplations of Katya, and his lack of any interest in anything else but his desire to mourn his lost love. In terms of the latter, we see how he has no interest in hanging out with his friends and even doesn’t want to attend a reunion that he had apparently been looking forward to.
Symbolic Signifiers
Director Andrew Haigh also permeates the film with symbolic signifiers, many of which are visual cues, all of which speak to Kate’s brewing existential crisis.
A Psychological “Ghost”
As we see above, Haigh captures the depth and breadth of this existential crisis for Kate in many ways. Most prominently, however, he hauntingly makes Katya a psychological ghost that inhabits their relationship. That is, he uses the “ghost” trope as a way to capture what Kate realizes, just how deep Katya goes into Geoff’s psyche, how her “ghost” has in effect always been with them. (That closing door and how the photo slides of her are projected in a way that makes her look like a ghost visually punctuates this haunting sensibility. See below for more.)
Reinforcing this idea, in a key confrontation moment, Kate tells Geoff that a “perfume smell” is around the house “and it’s her perfume, okay?” Now either this is literal or figurative. That is, either Geoff is actually, disturbingly, spraying Katya’s perfume around the house (perhaps she smelled it more strongly in the attic and put two and two together) or she is figuratively saying that Katya’s presence is so palpable that she even “smells” her perfume.
Katya’s Pregnancy
Even more disturbingly, in the same confrontation scene I mention above, Kate says that Katya has influenced their lives, in “small” ways and in “large” ways. The large ways must be them not having children. In terms of Katya’s pregnancy, it is interesting to think about the fact that Geoff and Kate do not have any children, making one wonder if this has something to do with Geoff and him not wanting a child from any other woman than Katya. In any case, that Geoff was going to have a family with Katya and not Kate adds to the level of just how much more invested Geoff was in Katya.
Kate as Proxy for Katya (!)
The disturbing element here is that Geoff may have tried to at least hang on to Katya’s spirit in their relationship the best he could, in effect making Kate his Katya. If indeed Geoff used Kate as a sort of proxy for Katya, then this obsession may have gone to a very dark and sick place.
To support this possibility, Haigh gives us many signs of this: For one thing, Kate looks like Katya and their names are similar. Did Geoff even choose Kate because she reminded him of Katya???
Further, the sex scene is very interesting. Apparently, Kate and Geoff haven’t had sex in a long time (Geoff asks out loud if he remembers what to do), so already the timing of Geoff initiating sex is interesting, but then he closes his eyes while they are making love, Kate telling him to “open [his] eyes,” which, when he does, he loses his erection. Was Geoff fantasizing about having sex with Katya?
Also, though Geoff has a camera (a “Yashica”), unlike his photographs of Katya, he has apparently, crazily, never taken a picture of Kate, another suggestion that he loved Katya more than he ever loved Kate. The deeper and disturbing implication here is that he may have wanted to think of him being with Katya and not Kate, and so seeing photos of their life together — markers of their experiences and history — might have made that more difficult.
In yet another sign of just how deeply Geoff’s investment of Katya is, the film begins with the sound of a slide projector playing over the credit sequence, perhaps suggesting that Geoff going up to the attic after the discovery of her body isn’t the first time Geoff has gone up into the attic to “be with Katya.” If the attic space has always been “his Katya” space, where he could be with his Katya, that makes this moment when Katya’s body has been discovered more than just a momentary revitalization of this tender memory for Geoff. That worn out photo of Katya (suggesting that Geoff has handled it many times) and how the attic is where his memory of Katya has been set-up (that scrap book looms large), all seem to reinforce that Geoff has been using the attic space for being with “his Katya” for a long time.
Interesting too is that moment when Geoff first talks about how Katya dies and Kate mentions that she lost her mother in the same year, but that neither had talked to each other about these difficult losses, suggesting that perhaps they haven’t shared their most intimate moments in life, which, in turn, suggests that perhaps they never really were as bonded as married couples should be.
Going back to Kate’s declaration that Katya has influenced their lives in “small” ways, she mentions as the small ways their choices for vacation, though, interestingly, these “small” ways may even have included their choice of their dogs, German Shepherds, which makes sense since Katya was…German!
To really get at the disturbing implication of Kate not being who Geoff really wanted, the question I would pose isn’t would Geoff have married Katya had she not died – he said he would – but, rather, more disturbingly, would he replace Kate with Katya even after 45 years of marriage??? I think the answer is clear.
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
All of the above is climaxed in the truly disturbing twist at the end. As everything seems to be going back to normal and Kate seems to get her Geoff back, the song (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”) in which they first danced at their wedding celebration is played for their 45th anniversary celebration and Kate seems to finally listen to the lyrics. That Geoff “has always liked this song” suggests that he had some say in it being chosen for their wedding song, something that Kate didn’t consider when it was first played. Now, knowing what she knows about Katya, she finally hears the words:
They asked me how I knew
My true love was true
Oh, I of course replied
Something here inside cannot be denied
They said someday you’ll find
All who love are blind
Oh, when your heart’s on fire
You must realize
Smoke gets in your eyes
So I chaffed them and I gaily laughed
To think they could doubt my love
Yet today my love has flown away
I am without my love
Now laughing friends deride
Tears I cannot hide
Oh, so I smile and say
When a lovely flame dies
Smoke gets in your eyes
Smoke gets in your eyes
What’s crazy about these lyrics is that they so clearly speak to a lost love (Katya) not a consummating love (Kate). The lyrics “Yet today my love has flown away; I am without my love” and “Tears I cannot hide…; When a lovely flame dies” explicitly speak to a lost love, perhaps even a deceased love (“lovely flame dies”). The rest of the song then is not about some future relationship but about that past relationship that was lost. When Kate stops and we see her final distressed and disturbed clarity, it is something akin to the ground beneath her – and as we become sutured into her existential crisis, to us too – collapsing. That is because the deeper implication of this moment suggests that Geoff was at the very least partly still including Katya when he married Kate, though the even more disturbing association is that perhaps he was even fantasizing about what could and should have been, Geoff marrying Katya, not Kate.
Deeper Implications
The even deeper (ideological) implications of the above is threefold:
The Feminist Point: Kate has let herself largely be determined by Geoff, which, for some women in general but especially for women from this generation, is/was common. At one point, in response to some social organizer guy who asks about a “table top,” Kate says that Geoff didn’t want one, because he thought it was a “bourgeois tradition,” suggesting that from the beginning of their wedding (and we get Kate saying as much in that key confrontation scene), that he was making the decisions in their marriage. In this way, we can see how sexist ideologies (patriarchy, sexist gender norms, hypermasculinity, religious belief systems) stress this norm of the man making all of the decisions in a relationship – or at least the important ones – and more to the point, often somewhat or even largely determining a woman’s identity.
And that is why I think Kate is so shattered when she realizes how deep this goes: She realizes that not only has her marriage been a lie but that she has allowed her husband to largely determine her choices, her self.
The Metaphysical Point: Kate’s existential crisis is unsettling for all of us as we can’t help but consider something similar happening in our own lives. That is, we can see how what may seem like an indisputable truth or reality is not. And, like we see with Kate, such a revelation can destabilize our very sense of our self or our surety in the reality we live in. The examples of this are many, such as venerating someone who ends up being corrupt (we saw this with the scandal involving a multitude of Roman Catholic priests involved in either molesting children/boys or covering these crimes up) or, similar to Kate’s discovery, discovering that a cherished loved one is not what they seem. The even deeper implication is how we need a humanity that is more interrogating in determining reality, not just accepting what is given or created for us. Perhaps had Kate had a more critical thinking cognition (and a more feminist sensibility!), she would have seen the signs earlier of Geoff’s disorders.
The Psychological Focus: Though perhaps only symptomatically, the film at least touches on two psychological issues, Geoff’s bereavement disorder and his unhealthy fixation on Katya.
In terms of bereavement issues, one of the things that this film gave me is just how complicated dealing with the death of a loved one can potentially be. Apparently, Geoff’s case of possibly using Kate as a replacement or even a proxy does happen, or something along the lines of what we see. In terms of Geoff, he apparently never worked through his loss of Katya, instead psychologically never really accepting her loss — something akin to a “complicated bereavement” (aka “prolonged grief”) disorder — and even a kind of “transference” of her to Kate. In this framing, the film explores not just the trauma of losing a loved one but the disturbing repercussions of not addressing that loss in a healthy way, where one can then move on to have other healthy relationships.
In terms of Geoff’s unhealthy fixation issue, clearly Geoff has never been able to relegate Katya to a more healthy memory, instead continuing to fixate on her in an almost obsessive way. It may be that because her dead body was never retrieved, Geoff never got the closure he needed. Moreover, because Katya died while they were in the glory of their romantic relationship — never getting to the later years when a relationship/marriage invariably slips into the more “ordinary” — Geoff continues to think about her and their relationship in unrealistic romantic-idealistic terms, probably even romanticizing it even more over the years.
In short, 45 Years is an important film not just because it gives us the mother of all individual existential crises, but because it explores why that existential crisis existed in the first place. In that, the film is a cautionary tale as well, to have the cognitive (feminist, interrogating, critical thinking) tools to not suffer the same fate as Kate.