Love Hurts

There are moments of awareness that occur in the course of some romantic relationships that can change them so completely that what was cemented over time bursts with the fragility of a soap bubble. This is the reality of love, and what is masterfully captured in the film 45 Years.

There are not that many films about romantic relationships that present the point of view of a woman who realizes that the man she loves and with whom she has built a life has never really felt for her what she perceived. While many films capture the range of romantic relationships, curiously they don’t capture what has probably led to more divorces than anything else. This is not love lost, it’s love that never really was.

In 45 Years a childless couple, Geoff Mercer (Tom Courtenay), and his wife of 45 years, Kate, played with stunning realism by Charlotte Rampling, are living a supposedly happily-married life in the English countryside when Geoff receives word that that the body of Katia, the girlfriend of his youth, has been found preserved in a glacier in the Swiss alps where she went missing a half-century ago while they were on a hiking trip. This is the beginning of the unraveling of Geoff and Kate’s relationship and Kate’s realization of the relationship she was really living. This takes place over five days.

Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years

Movies capture a vast range of romantic relationships. Maybe too many of them are of the they lived happily-ever-after kind (derogatorily referred to as “chick flicks”, by sexists). There are also a lot of the love goes tragic kind where something or someone gets between the lovers, yet their love is mutual and never dies (even if one of them does). Illness strikes, for example, and we have all the way from the cancer that separates the young lovers in The Fault in Our Stars, to old-age dementia in Michael Haneke’s amazing Amour. It can be war and/or a marriage to someone else (marriage not for love) that separates the lovers, and there are as many of those as there are rom-coms, including some greats like Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, Joe Wright’s Atonement, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, Neil Jordan’s The End of an Affair, or even Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, to name but a few. There are also those about society’s senseless mores that separate lovers: racism, homophobia, classism; movies like Ettore Scola’s We All Loved Each Other so Much, Todd Hayne’s Far From Heaven, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, or even Robert Wise’s West Side Story (and all the other Romeo and Juliet inspired films).

But I can think of few movies that address the true heartache of realizing the simple fact that the one we thought loved us as much as we loved them never really cared that much, but fell into the comfort of being loved. In 45 Years there is the complication of a terrible deceit, not uncommon in these relationships. In fact, they are built on deceit.

Meryl Streep in Heartburn

There is Heartburn, directed by Mike Nichols, which comes to mind. Heartburn is based on Nora Ephron’s autobiographical novel about her marriage to Carl Bernstein. Ephron wrote the screenplay to the movie and this is without a doubt why this movie contains so much heartache. Ephron has penned some of the most successful romantic comedies ever, including When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle, but without a doubt Heartburn is the only real relationship of the lot.

And now there is 45 Years, which tops the list. The film is beautifully directed by Andrew Haigh, who does a wonderful job of keeping the pace of the movie on track with the crumbling relationship. But it is Charlotte Rampling who makes this film into a masterpiece. As movie critic Peter Travers writes: “In 45 Years, Rampling shows us everything a true actress can do without a hint of excess or a single wasted motion.”

I’ve written about romantic films on Valentine’s Day before, being the die-hard romantic that I am, but for every love that lingers in its happiness, it is undeniable that there are probably ten that don’t. So here’s to this reality of love as well. There are many movies about the wonders of love and then there is that final scene in 45 Years in which we are witness to that heartbreakingly haunting stare the brilliant Charlotte Rampling gives of a life lost to love.