45 Years (15A)

We don’t have a ‘Movie of the Week’ slot on this programme, but the new release 45 Years would be worth creating one for. It is a kind of diary of a marriage, done with impeccable precision and feeling and played with a lifetime of experience by two supremely accomplished performers – Charlote Rampling and Tom Courtney.

They play Kate and Geoff, a retired school teacher and trade-union official, living near the Norfolk Broads and planning their 45th wedding anniversary when we meet them. The husband then receives a letter from Switzerland, informing him that a melting glacier has exposed the preserved body of his former German girlfriend, who had fallen to her death in an accident, nearly half a century ago.

This sends the wife, in particular, into an emotional tailspin, and, at this stage of their lives, she suddenly seems to be heading in one direction and he is going in another. He begins to search out memorabilia that recalls his past with the dead girlfriend, and she is planning the party that will celebrate their life together.

45 Years plays like a ghost story in which everything that this couple has achieved together is chipped away by a voice from the past – he begins to leave their bed at night and visit the attic where he views slides of the visit to Switzerland and his relationship with the girlfriend. In one poignant scene, she runs her hands along the edges of the attic door as if she is afraid of something seeping through. 

There isn’t a singled flabby scene in 45 Years, which writer/director Andrew Haigh has adapted from a short story called In Another Country, and delivers here with a supreme command of cinema. As I’ve said Rampling and Courtney are excellent, but she plays a particularly full and sympathetic character, a woman in her 60s trying desperately to understand what her life should be.

We are Young Friends (16)

We Are Your Friends is a coming-of-age drama set in the world of electronic dance music in which Zac Efron plays Cole, a bright, intelligent 23 year old who declined to go to college so that he could focus on his passion of becoming a club DJ.

Surrounded by friends who are burnouts and losers, he meets James (Wes Bentley), a legendary DJ who’s pushing 40 and may be a little past his prime. Even though Cole secretly thinks James has sold out, trading innovation for easy paydays, he’s excited to be taken under the man’s wing.

But the mentorship gets complicated once Cole becomes smitten with James’ girlfriend and personal assistant Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski).

Although Cole works with turntables, laptops and samplers, Cole is no different from the protagonists of bygone find-your-voice films in which a struggling songwriter or dancer learns that he must be true to himself so that he can really express what’s inside of him. 

Miss Julie (Club)

Liv Ulman, Ingmar Bergman’s long-time muse, hasn’t directed a feature since Faithless in 2000 and Miss Julie partly explains why – she really has very little to say.

Miss Julie transposes the Strindberg play of the same title to Co Fermanagh on Midsummer’s Night in 1890, when a smart, scheming valet (Colin Farrell) at an Anglo-Irish country house finds himself caught between his employer’s spoiled daughter (Jessica Chastain) – who encourages him to seduce her – and the cook (a matronly Samantha Morton) to whom he seems to be engaged.

The story develops throughout the evening and night, becoming a kind of survival of the fittest; a struggle to see which of them has been best equipped by their class to triumph over the other.

Miss Julie sounds and feels like a very dated choice of film subject at this stage; the acting, the delivery of the dialogue, and the placement of the actors are sometimes stilted and theatrical, and apart from two or three scenes at the beginning and end, the choice of settings is limited and monotonous.

Another surprise is the failure to integrate the historical context into the story with any degree of narrative point or purpose.