21/10/2024 - Time is fleeting for lovebirds Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, in John Crowley’s lachrymose terminal-illness drama

l-r: Grace Delaney, Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh in We Live in Time

Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield play fictional characters romantically entwined in We Live in Time [+see also:
trailer
film profile], but the film’s primary appeal is imagining if the central couple were literally Pugh and Garfield, so close are their characters to the actors’ typical personas. That links this amiable love story from Irish director John Crowley – best known previously for Brooklyn [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] with Saoirse Ronan – to the concept of the “star vehicle” in mainstream cinema. Seen as an endangered species, with high-concept and IP-driven films now more lucrative at the box office, they’re gradually coming back into fashion, asserting a performer’s own charisma as the biggest on-screen special effect. The film, made from an original screenplay by British playwright Nick Payne, has just enjoyed its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, having previously shown at Toronto and San Sebastián.

We Live in Time is also an endearingly sincere story, where Payne and Crowley seek to capture the very essence of functional, monogamous relationships: how they work, how we perceive their defining moments in our memories, and how the balance shifts when one half’s life is under threat. Knowing how cinema, and stories more broadly, apply an editor’s eye to time and retain only the most narratively vital moments, the filmmakers here take that as the operating principle for showing the romance of two people, with sequences from three temporal narrative strands braided by their own emotional relevance to one another, rather than linear chronology.

So, thanks to this storytelling choice, Pugh (as elite chef Almut) and Garfield (as Tobias, a mild-mannered IT manager for UK breakfast-cereal giant Weetabix) can first lay eyes on one another, debate conceiving a child, and the former can receive a shattering ovarian cancer diagnosis, all somewhere in the first act, with the three events mirroring one another in their consequences for the relationship. Crowley successfully generates a light tone and a pleasant aesthetic surface, too, deploying a honeyed colour scheme and soft-focus close-ups from DoP Stuart Bentley. As Pugh shows why she’s been compared from her career’s inception to Kate Winslet, in her assertive, strong-willed speeches and withering stares, Garfield comfortably acts as a foil – a “supporting” character in temperament even if he’s undeniably a co-lead in screen time and importance. His face crumples into a passive-aggressive smile, with his mutterings side-stepping across what he truly wants to express, in a manner befitting Hugh Grant, another former mainstay of these upscale, contemporary British dramas.

But with the stakes sharpening into Almut competing at a prestigious cooking competition in Lyon – appropriately named, in Cannes Film Festival-style, as the Bocuse d’Or – the film becomes more predictable and conventional, especially as we realise its time-shifting structure camouflages a story that would seem more prosaic in its natural order. It nods to a hetero-flexible sexual identity for Almut as well, referencing a past relationship with her female haute-cuisine mentor and a resistance to the nuclear family, but this feels tokenistic in attempting to distract from how normative and picture-perfect the two seem as a couple otherwise. Even though We Live in Time’s events are always plausible, it still feels like a cousin of speculative films like Arrival and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where romantic possibilities exist in branching, parallel timelines; similarly, charm and shameless manipulation are Crowley and Payne’s dual payoffs, reaping not quite the best of both worlds.

We Live in Time is a co-production of the UK and France, staged by StudioCanal, SunnyMarch, Film4 and Shoebox Films. Its world sales are handled by StudioCanal.

Photogallery 28/09/2024: San Sebastian 2024 - We Live in Time

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John Crowley, Andrew Garfield, Fiona Weir
© 2024 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso