45 Years
The story of a long relationship told in a week
This film tells the story of a married couple who have been together for 45 years. Theirs is an intricate relationship that is portrayed with great sensitivity and delicacy. I was fascinated by the two main characters, Kate and her husband Geoff and how well they related in spite of being very different in such recognisable ways: she appears as warm and loyal but prone to doubts about her significance and importance for Geoff, while he appears to be very amiable and easy going. However, he avoids areas of conflict in their relationship at all costs.
The film focuses on the week that leads up to the celebration of the 45th anniversary of their marriage. At the beginning of this week Geoff receives a letter revealing that the body of a young woman called Katya he had known when he was young has been recovered from its frozen state in the Alps. Geoff and herself were on a hiking trip there when she fell into a snow-filled crevasse from which her body had never been recovered.
Enter another woman
After Kate becomes aware of Geoff moving around in their attic during the night she wonders what has he been looking for there. So while he is away in town she goes up to the attic and finds there a projector and some videos he had made of his time in the Alps with Katya. Kate is deeply affected by this, especially when she notices that Katya is pregnant. These images haunt her for the rest of the week that the film focuses on.
While Geoff gets lost in the memory of what happened to the woman whom he admits he would have married if she had lived, Kate is left to ponder the fact that she was his second choice and one that never quite met his expectations. As the week wears on she confronts him with her belief that she was never enough for him, that she had not his whole heart.
So much hangs on the answer we get
when we question another’s love;
we need to make doubly sure.
For as long as there is doubt
The conviction we thirst for
is only half satisfied.
A questioning of our significance we identify with
We can identify with Kate for hers is an issue that haunts our close relationships and often leads us to question who we are for those closest to us in life. Perhaps our feeling of insignificance that results from our importance for others being left unsaid is the source of a deep wound which certain circumstances, like the one Kate here experiences, easily aggravates afresh. This often pains us when much of the love we receive and give is left unnoticed, unnamed, unowned and thus unsaid. The centrality of this love to our lives is powerfully expressed in the Greek story about a woman called Care.
Care makes and sustains us
Care was crossing a river one day when she took some soft mud and shaped it into a human being. She wanted to give what she had made her own name but Earth also laid claim to this right. It was, after all, of earth or humus that the human being was formed. Care then asked Jupiter, who was passing by, to give her creation a spirit. This he gladly agreed to do but then he too wanted it called after him. They decided to ask Saturn to be arbiter and he gave the following decision which seemed a wise one. Jupiter had given it spirit, so he would receive that back when death came. Since it was of earth or humus that it was fashioned, it would be called a human being. However, since Care had formed this human being, it would be her role, as long as this being lived, to make and sustain it.
Where the life we dream of is to be found
Jesus elaborates on this truth that it is Care that ‘makes and sustains’ us when he says that the essence of life is to be found in getting our whole person involved in the way we receive and give love within the main relationships of life.
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Lk 10:25-28
To move forward we must move back
There are a number of reasons why we fail to foster the love which more than anything else is life-giving. There is first of all the hard work involved in learning to believe in the love that is all around us if we could take the time to recognise it. Then there is the fear of arousing the demons in our past or of opening old wounds that reside there. We are afraid of delving into our story for we suspect that we will be confronted by its demons, even though these in fact form a small part of our story. Finally there is so much emphasis on career, success and prosperity in today’s dominant culture that we find it difficult to make the time, energy and resources available if we are to make the way we love and relate a priority in life.
Looking at each other as well as at One beyond us
An illusion that damages our relationships
Though it is not raised in the course of the film, our illusion that another human being can fulfil our desire for love and intimacy has got to be faced. The reality that we are made for a love which no one or no thing can satisfy is immortalised in Augustine’s words: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts will be restless till they rest in you.” To expect another human being to fully meet our need for love and intimacy is an unfair burden to lay on someone whose capacity to love and relate is essentially limited and sometimes misused.
Not leaving our love unsaid
At the end of the film when Geoff finally gets around to expressing his love for Kate, he says that marrying her was the best decision he ever made. We get little sense of how this affected her when in the final scene of the film we see her in the midst of all her and his friends standing alone and overcome with emotion. We are left wondering what this could mean: Is it that she realises she had not been attentive to the signs of his love and had focussed rather on its deficiencies? Could her sadness be that after doubting his love for so long that his words at the celebration were not sufficient to overcome this well established doubt or could it be that her sadness was due to her having misjudged Geoff so badly?
Seeing a vision each with our own eyes
We always remain a mystery to each other
Relationships are mysterious, we remain a mystery even to those we would say we know best. Kate especially, is an extremely reserved person and does not reveal much about what she thinks and even less about how she feels. This is despite the fact that she is a retired teacher and the more articulate of the two. The intricacy of their relationship is added to when we consider the mystery of how men and women relate in very distinctive ways. This adds such a richness but also a complexity to their relationship.
The dignity of difference
Sharing involves having a self to share
How they dealt with the complexity of their relationship is easy to sympathise with for we all have great difficulty revealing ourselves to each other, as in the absence of an ability to reflect and pray we do not know ourselves in much depth and we have great difficulty articulating what we do know. Yet my lasting impression of the film is of how wonderful Kate and Geoff were in the way they related with each other. There was a style or beauty about each of them as individuals that is heightened by the way they love and relate with each other.
Life in all its glory
The novelists of the 19th century, like Jane Austin, George Elliot and Charles Dickens saw the sublime reality of two people falling in love and committing themselves to each other as an expression of the deepest dream of humanity. In this film we see an even deeper expression of it in the way two people have lived out this commitment in such a sublime way. It is a way of loving and relating in which they have found life in the place in which Jesus says above we are all asked to find it. He says to Kate and Geoff what he says to us all: “… do this, and you will live.” Lk 10:28 For this reason he would look at and love them as he did the rich young man in the Gospel story.
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him and loved him. Mk 10:17-21
Having a self to share
Following the wrong god home we may miss our star
In the following poem we are asked to remain awake to this sublime reality “lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark”.
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park.
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford