45 Years

The film’s title 45 Years is deceptive since watching it feels like a hundred, even though it ostensibly takes place over the course of six days. At the end of each day amazingly little happens of either esthetic or existential interest in the life of an aging childless couple Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff Mercer (Tom Courtenay). Andrew Haigh’s direction captures the claustrophobia of the well kempt bucolic existence that characterizes the Mercer’s life populated as it is with all the electronic conveniences that upscale retirees with pensions in rural areas of England might be expected to possess. In fact, the comfortableness of the existence is almost haunting since it bespeaks a certain inevitability; it’s very much like the conversations between the couple with their subdued expressions of caring that border on a kind of helplessness. The sixth and last day will be the long anticipated wedding anniversary and it’s here that the film goes awry. As if to look for problems Geoff digs up a past which will be the basis of Kate’s eventual feeling of betrayal, artfully dramatized by Rampling in a final scene of repudiation that her husband doesn’t even notice. It’s this very turn of plot in which the volume is turned up on something which wasn’t even an infidelity that seems so implausible. Not to over interpret a fictional creation, but isn't the point not so much deception as finding a signpost in an otherwise monotonous and meaningless existence? And why don't the characters and/or their director at least acknowledge the fact that they're creating a tempest in a teapot? The sequence of the film that really is the most telling is one of lovemaking. No one wants to see the feckless attempt at consummation by an elderly couple (she played by a once glamorous actress with now rail thin legs, he by the one time star of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner now sporting a nice front porch) but that makes it all the more interesting. Yet after failing Haigh seems content to let Geoff simply roll off his wife and fall asleep. The fate of sexuality is, of course, the big question of senescence. The neurogenic pathways once programmed for desire are like highways without cars. The missing fuel is, naturally, libido and how are the Mercers to bide the their time? It’s a question that 45 Years unfortunately leaves unanswered.

The Bourgeois Mind

Nicholas Berdyaev wrote a book called The Bourgeois Mind, a title that is intriguing because it encompasses so much of modernity, from Bovary, to Babbitt, to Thorston Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption. But any lab examination of a bourgeois mind preserved in formaldehyde would surely demonstrate that the oppressed populace Frantz Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth has no monopoly on dissatisfaction. H. Rap Brown once said that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” So is rebellion. The flappers of the Jazz age gave way to the nice girls who fell for rebels and criminals. The Jean Seberg character in Godard’s Breathless is the prototypical American innocent who falls for the criminal. What was a nice Jewish girl like Hettie Cohen doing with the proto black nationalist who was to change his name from LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka? Read her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones. Today white suburban kids constitute the biggest audience for the violent lyrics of rappers like Snoop Doggy Dog.

   

In The Loneliness of the  Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the British novelist Alan Sillitoe distilled England’s class hatred for dissatisfied sixties baby boomers who enjoyed all the advantages of an emerging prosperity. Sillitoe, who died this past Sunday, April 25, created a crucible of class consciousness that fueled the revolutionary aspirations of a whole generation of youthful Americans, whose art house excursions (both Loneliness and Saturday Night were made into classic movies with such cinema greats as Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, and Rachel Rogers) to theatres like the Paris and the Thalia in Manhattan provided the launching pad for rioting against what they deemed to be the empty values and aspirations of their parents. John Osborne is one of the few “angry young men” whose message seems to survive its periodicity. Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is still occasionally performed, and Jimmy Porter has achieved iconic status in the pantheon of rebels whose cause was basically life. Yet the gritty world out of which Sillitoe came, and from which his writing provided an escape, left an indelible imprint on the sons and daughters of an age of prosperity who were contriving their own escape—in this case from the hard won comforts of the merchant and professional class.