A bitter-sweet love story, more bitter than sweet. With their 45th wedding anniversary looming, Norfolk pensioners Kate and Geoff Mercer get a letter that tells them the body of Geoff's first great love has been found in a glacier in Switzerland.
I thought for a moment that this was going to be a murder mystery, but it's not. The tragedy was accidental (she fell into a crevasse), but the dead woman now casts a huge shadow over their anniversary plans, and over their marriage.
We see the couple in Norwich city centre, on a boat trip on the Broads and at parties with friends (Geraldine James delivers solid support as Kate's best friend, blessed/cursed with a ukulele-playing husband), but this is essentially a 'chamber piece', with most of the scenes concentrated around Kate and Geoff in their dinky little cottage on the edge of a small village. There's a bedroom scene which is both touching and cringe-making.
Out of bed as well as in, Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling give performances that make you feel every moment of their love and their pain. Rampling is mesmerising in wordless scenes, searingly conveying Kate's inner turmoil; her face in the final frame suggests that the end of the movie is very much not the end of the story.
The pace is slow, intentionally so. Not a movie for fans of high-octane action or smutty farce, but if you have happy memories of THE GO-BETWEEN (remake shortly to be seen on BBCtv), you will savour this. I did.
I thought for a moment that this was going to be a murder mystery, but it's not. The tragedy was accidental (she fell into a crevasse), but the dead woman now casts a huge shadow over their anniversary plans, and over their marriage.
We see the couple in Norwich city centre, on a boat trip on the Broads and at parties with friends (Geraldine James delivers solid support as Kate's best friend, blessed/cursed with a ukulele-playing husband), but this is essentially a 'chamber piece', with most of the scenes concentrated around Kate and Geoff in their dinky little cottage on the edge of a small village. There's a bedroom scene which is both touching and cringe-making.
Out of bed as well as in, Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling give performances that make you feel every moment of their love and their pain. Rampling is mesmerising in wordless scenes, searingly conveying Kate's inner turmoil; her face in the final frame suggests that the end of the movie is very much not the end of the story.
The pace is slow, intentionally so. Not a movie for fans of high-octane action or smutty farce, but if you have happy memories of THE GO-BETWEEN (remake shortly to be seen on BBCtv), you will savour this. I did.