“I’m a complete hoarder,” director Andrew Haigh says. “I keep everything I’ve ever had.” He used to store these mementos in boxes under his bed, before realizing that having all this material so close at hand was giving him trouble sleeping. “I couldn’t cope with them being in my house anymore,” he says. “If the memories are good, that’s great, but if not, they can be a burden.”In his latest film, “45 Years,” bad memories are located not under the bed but in the attic. Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay)
are childless retirees
who live in relative seclusion, peaceful and seemingly happy, in
the English countryside. They’re anticipating a 45th-wedding-anniversary party, scheduled for the following weekend, and the most stressful decision is whether to request that the DJ play “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by the Platters.But in the film’s opening moments, something changes: Geoff receives a letter about a former girlfriend, Katia, whose body has been found 50 years after she disappeared in the mountains of Switzerland. Soon enough, Geoff
starts making frequent late-night trips to the couple’s cramped attic to reconnect with his lost love through a trove
of stashed photos, letters, and diaries.Haigh, who adapted the script from a short story by David Constantine, was intrigued by “an idealized version of the past having a profound effect on a present relationship,”
he says. “Thematically, it interests me: someone trying to work out
if they have made
the right choices, and
the melancholy that comes with looking back on one’s life and having regrets.” It’s a struggle that also resonates
in Haigh’s previous film, “Weekend,” and even
his now-canceled HBO television series, “Looking.”So, does the director think all relationships are essentially doomed? “I’m a pessimistic optimist about them,” he says, laughing. “They’re the most important thing
in most of our lives, they end up defining us. We have a desperate desire to be understood and not
to be alone in the world — and that comes with confusion and difficulty.”This article originally appeared in the January issue of Modern Painters.
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