45 Years review – Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling superb as couple freshly possessed by the past

The terrifying persistence of the past is the theme, and the tendency of the past to seem so much more real and more vivid than anything in the present. The repressed returns – and makes the repressor look weak. This is the second time I have seen 45 Years since it made its bow at the Berlin film festival earlier this year, and it has grown in my mind, a commanding, contemplative movie from director Andrew Haigh, adapted by him from a short story by David Constantine.

The angel and devil are in its tiny details: a film to be compared with Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) or even David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), with both characters in the Celia Johnson role. It could be the finest hour for both of its lead actors. Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling play Kate and Geoff Mercer: a retired childless couple living quietly in a beautiful but bleak Norfolk landscape that begins to assume the sinister grandeur of Hardy’s Wessex.

Kate is a former headteacher with a natural authority and severity; she is still widely liked and respected in the local community. One of the first scenes shows her chatting with a pupil, now the local postman, who can’t help being slightly in awe of her. Her husband is very different: Geoff was a manager at a local engineering business who came up from the shopfloor ranks, an ex-union man who loathes the way this country went in the 1980s. Like his wife, he is trying to give up smoking, and he can get a little bit stroppy with a drink inside him. There is a gentle poignancy of this elderly couple getting into the marital bed every night in their shapeless, oatmeal-coloured T-shirts.

As the drama begins, Kate and Geoff are organising a huge party to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary. Earlier preparations for a 40th anniversary bash were cancelled because of a medical crisis that may or may not have had a psychosomatic element, and from the first there seems something ominously contingent and wrong about the number 45.

With a few days to go, Geoff receives an extraordinary official letter from a small Swiss town. The perfectly preserved body of a young woman has been discovered: Katya, who in 1962 fell to her death in an icy glacier – while on holiday with the young Geoff.

Geoff now reveals, to his wife’s astonishment, that the authorities have contacted him because they believe him to be Katya’s next of kin, as he and Katya had to pretend to be married in that conservative time and place to get hotel accommodation. Was Geoff more deeply in love with this previous girlfriend than Kate thought? Did he ever stop being in love with her? Or is Katya an illusion, a ghost on to whom Kate and Geoff are now projecting their own fears? The resemblance of the two women’s names is not explicitly remarked on. In the days that follow, an awful truth emerges.

Courtenay, Rampling and Haigh coolly convey the profound disturbance that this revelation creates, and its aftermath, a slo-mo explosion. At first the shock is exciting, even erotic. It reminds Geoff and Kate of their younger selves, alive with choices and possibilities. Geoff is transported at his memory of seeing Kate for the first time. “You were a bloody knockout!” he says, his voice becoming an almost defiant passionate growl.

There is a rich sensuality in the way Kate looks at him in bed. Rampling’s hooded gaze has never been so potent: I was reminded of Martin Amis’s description of Salman Rushdie: like a falcon looking through a Venetian blind. At first it looks as if the forthcoming celebration will be cathartic, and that well-meaning frailty will not be punished too severely. But it is not quite as simple as that.

The impossibility of ever really knowing another person becomes more terrible the older you grow together: one of the film’s saddest scenes shows Kate digging some old piano music out of a cupboard and start playing. Marriage had made her forget how good she was. Could she, should she, have been more successful and happier with another person? Music, too, is terrifying: old tunes with intense associations will occasionally come on the radio – songs that must either be loyally sung and danced along to, or firmly turned off.

Rampling’s ambiguous emotional reactions in the film’s gripping final minutes could show any number of things: that her life has been a lie, or that this is the truth, that the people we meet, the people we love, the people we ourselves come to be – they are all random, all just an accident. Or is she seeing an even scarier truth? Behind all the happy faces that she sees, ostensibly as happy as hers, there is utter turmoil. It is supremely intelligent and moving and Rampling and Courtenay are superb.