It should require serious ambition to attempt the contemporary romantic drama, a largely exhausted film tradition. This should be doubly true if that drama is nonlinear — why dwell in Oppenheimer’s shadow? While not quite the affective breakthrough the romance film needs, John Crowley’s We Live in Time exercises an assertive edit philosophy and charismatic realism to expose a neglected conceptual intersection of love and time.
We Live in Time comes after the brutal trope-ification of cancer in the romance film. Terminal illness became a prolific motif in the genre after Arthur Hiller’s Love Story; it reached our generation via The Fault in Our Stars. Wisely, We Live in Time does not feign novelty in this respect — the film discloses Almut’s (Florence Pugh) recurring ovarian cancer in its very first sequence, which is set in the latest of three cross-edited timelines. There is an insightful discrepancy between the way that the narrative and the edit treat time: For the story, she is assigned to die, but for the composition, her life is omnipresent. Her cinematic life does not progress straightforwardly to death, but is rather considered as a stitchwork of defining moments.
If a love story is only as good as its lovers, then Crowley must be thankful for Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh. I won’t be the first to appreciate Pugh’s performance — her “vibrancy” as the relentless Almut, a Michelin star chef-owner. But there remains much to say about Garfield’s crucial role in Tobias, the anxious family man whose interpretation of love finds challenge in Almut’s ambitions. Some critics have been quick to dismiss Tobias as boring: He’s a divorced Weetabix salesman who claims no real ambitions for himself. Garfield sells the part with a palpably sincere empathy for the character. He understands that Tobias finds fulfillment in family — his father, daughter and wife. If we ever wonder why we rarely follow Tobias’s life outside of Almut’s, the film responds that Almut is his life. Tobias lives only for other people, and as such he struggles to understand Almut’s willingness to sacrifice her wellbeing to pursue the Bocuse d’Or, a prestigious chef competition. It turns out that Tobias’ modesty is a wellspring of conflict by which Crowley poses the essential question: Is love limited by time?
Crowley answers fruitfully through associative imagery and dramatic irony — we learn to associate and universalize recurring conflicts, namely how Tobias imposes his humble, family-oriented values on Almut, through the film’s non-linear conception of their love. Tobias reflects on his poor decision to bring up children way too early in their relationship: “It made me realize that I’ve been looking ahead, instead of right in front of me.” We are already aware at this point that Almut and Tobias will have a daughter; the irony has a vindicating effect on the audience’s view of Tobias, who might otherwise seem to come on unhealthily strong. Instead, the film takes quite seriously that Tobias has always had an accurate intuition that Almut would become central to his life. Their love feels almost atemporal — it exists irrespective of time by way of recontextualization. The film then infuses the scene with further meaning by answering Tobias’s realization with a glimpse of the future, a scene in which he and daughter Ella shave Almut’s head. What might be a depressing moment, cast in cold sunlight, is instead filled with laughter and comfort. The association of these two moments, at once an idea and its own realization, give credence to the film’s mosaic vision of time in love.
Crowley thanks the script for providing “all the pieces of this mosaic,” but it is his discretion that compelled him to “shuffle them and refine the logic for the film.” We might hesitate to use the word ‘auteur’ in the 21st century, but it seems most plausible that Crowley’s totalizing vision is what lends this film a thoroughly coherent and novel meaning. That is, his edit logic defines our interpretation of the featured relationship. There is something here that chronological narrative cannot express — the perseverance of love not through time but beyond it. Tobias must consider that he has had all the time he needed with Almut. Their love, the film suggests, does not depend on continuity.
Eric Han is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].