As we continue to catch up with the last gasps of last year, let us briefly discuss 45 Years, Anomalisa, The Assassin, and Memories of the Sword.
45 YEARS (2015)
Kate and Geoff Mercer (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay) are old British people, with 45 years of marriage behind them. But seven days before their newest anniversary—which has taken on a great deal of significance already, thanks to their 40th anniversary's preemption by Geoff's heart issues—they receive a letter from the far-off land of Switzerland, addressed specifically to Geoff, informing him that all these years later, they have found the central metaphor of this film, encased and preserved in glacial ice: the body of Geoff's old lover, Katya, who died back in 1962 when she fell into a mountain crevasse. Geoff grows increasingly compulsive about remembering Katya—and Kate grows increasingly apprehensive that she was not loved the way she always thought she was.
The thing that 45 Years is about is very, very obvious, which I presume my plot synopsis makes clear: both its main characters are, in many respects, crybabies—Geoff, because he still gives a shit about a woman who died almost half a century ago, and Kate, because she cannot understand why Geoff might give a shit, and also because despite being a grown woman of advanced age, she operates under the bizarre impression that our spouses (if we ever wind up with spouses) actually see us as the fulfillment of every stray fantasy about their ideal partner. Given that the only mate that most of us would ever actually perceive as truly perfect would be a telepathic shapeshifter with complementary sexual fetishes (who also shits dollar bills—or pounds sterling, if you like), I doubt any of us will ever find precisely what we're looking for in this world. This, you know, is the way of things. It's no reason to be unhappy. But, on the other hand, most of us are crybabies (yours truly included!). And unhappy we often are.
