Charlotte Rampling the best thing about glum '45 Years'

Andrew Haigh's restrained relationship drama "45 Years" stars Charlotte Rampling, a Soaring '60s icon who started with a Cadbury candy commercial before blasting to popularity in the 1966 ultra-mod romance "Georgy Girl."

Rampling's nuanced Oscar-nominated performance as Kate becomes the dramatic foundation for "45 Years," an English art house examination of a well-off lonely married couple - about to hit a 45th anniversary - whose relationship becomes tested by the arrival of shocking news.

Tom Courtenay plays Kate's amiable senior citizen hubby Geoff Mercer, who receives a missive with disturbing news about an old flame.

The perfectly preserved corpse of his one-time fiancee Katya has been discovered in a receding Swiss glacier five decades after she fell into an icy crevasse while taking a walk with Geoff in 1962.

Because Geoff's listed as a "next of kin," officials want to know if he can travel to Switzerland to identify the body. Is that all right with Kate?

Kate knows about Geoff's relationship with Katya. But does she really? She slowly discovers details of their relationship he has kept secret, and she begins to question their marriage just a week shy of their supposedly joyful anniversary.

What an Alfred Hitchcock or a Claude Chabrol would have done with this go-anywhere premise boggles the brain. Britain-born Haigh turns it into an emotionally tamped-down study of a relationship in crisis.

Rampling and Courtenay have little to do beyond appear glum and forlorn as their characters slog through an airless screenplay begging for a momentary respite of humor.

Even though each actor generates sufficient personal charisma, their characters share none, leaving Rampling and Courtenay to play to themselves for 93 minutes of catharsis-starved buildup.