Over the past few months, there has been this weight suffocating me about the rapid passage of time and how everything is so fleeting and quite often over too soon. In the grand scheme of the universe, we represent such a minute fraction of its lifespan. It can often feel hopeless to imagine any importance in the achievements, relationships, and possessions we hold. With these overwhelming and spiraling thoughts, there needs to be a reconciliation of this relationship with yourself.
John Crowley’s We Live In Time (2024), released last October and coming to Max on February 7, attempts to articulate this difficult journey through the story of award-winning chef Almut Brühl (Florence Pugh) and Weetabix IT employee Tobias Durand (Andrew Garfield), who fall in love and navigate the grace and hardships of life with each other, centered around Almut’s continued battle with stage 3 ovarian cancer.
The nonlinear narrative structure of this film strikes you immediately. You are taken from early mornings in a family home to first meetings during a car accident to hospital appointments and back again. This structure, symbolic of the notion that your life flashes before your eyes when you are close to death, can be interpreted as retrospection made by Almut.
For writer Nick Payne, who before this has mostly written for TV aside from an adapted screenplay for The Last Letter from Your Lover (2021), it’s an ambitious structure to incorporate into a first feature-length original screenplay. This risk could easily have lost audiences, but Payne’s trust in the audience pays off. Put simply: it works.
The score amplifies and plays with this retrospective atmosphere from Payne’s screenplay. From the moment we encounter Tobias getting ready for an interview, we are greeted with melodic acoustics that evoke a hopeful yet slightly gloomy feeling. Its composition reminded me of Taylor Swift’s folklore and The Tortured Poets Department–specifically the song “The Prophecy.” Hence, it came as no surprise to me when I discovered that the composer was Bryce Dessner, a member of the band The National who is a frequent collaborator of hers.
At its heart, We Live in Time is a love story that is real and raw, portrayed so earnestly by Pugh and Garfield. Both have a magnetic chemistry with one another, making their love palpable. Pugh’s performance is what every actor and every narrative choice was feeding off of; her ability to fully embody this woman at different stages of her life balancing what her identity means to her is wonderous to witness.
The best way to describe Garfield’s quiet elegance of Tobias is through a striking parallel seen during two bathtub sequences. The first shows Tobias in a bathtub after his dull Weetabix interview before signing his divorce papers in a coldly lit shot. The second shows Tobias and pregnant Almut in a warmly lit bathtub sharing a moment of peace. What Tobias does is grow from the sheer presence of Almut in his life, revitalizing the hopeful glint in his eyes. This is what his character, at his core, is fixated on: Almut. I was moved to tears at the moment (along with pretty much the whole of the film).
It is almost as if this film is the perfect blend of About Time (2013), a British romance film that deals with coming to terms with one’s mortality, and The Tree of Life (2011), a film that continuously splices between narratives involving the same family at different eras.
The film beautifully attempts to reconcile whether you have control over exactly how you will be remembered when you are gone, adding yet another layer of retrospection. Towards the end of the film, Almut struggles with the very real fear of her daughter not having enough memories of her when she wasn’t sick. She channels this fear by burning the candle at both ends–acting as a dutiful mother while training for a grueling culinary competition, all while dealing with the side effects of chemotherapy and her illness. She focuses on revolutionary accomplishments rather than the little moments, like how she cracks an egg.
The truth is we have very little agency on how anyone will remember us. The sum of a person’s life experiences will mean interactions between you and them will be perceived wildly differently. As the title of the film suggests, we live in time, at the mercy of time. If there is one detail to take away from this film, it’s that rather than let time control and consume your mind and heart, use time masterfully as a tool to connect with the world in a way that is meaningful to you.
Review Courtesy of Nandita Joshi
Feature Image Courtesy of A24 & StudioCanal