BY AJ SIYTANGCO
AT A GLANCE
The film also asks us to consider what happens when we run out of time. Suddenly, every moment is a big deal; every memory is a precious treasure. Time is a funny thing. And always, always, there never seems to be enough of it.
Time is a funny thing. Sometimes, it seems agonizingly slow, and other times, it looks unnecessarily fast. In either case, what stays with us are moments, snippets of time that mean something, good or bad.
It's these moments that director Josh Crowley’s (Brooklyn) new film, We Live In Time, wants to try and explore. The movie follows the lives of Almut and Tobias, played by Florence Pugh (Oppenheimer, Dune 2) and Andrew Garfield (Tick Tock Boom, Spider-Man No Way Home) as they navigate their shared life together.
Almut is an aspiring chef and restaurateur with a bright career ahead of her, while Tobias is an affable recent divorcee working for the Weetabix company. In the romantic tradition of the meet-cute, Almut runs Tobias over with her car by accident, and the two, pardon the pun, hit it off.
Pugh and Garfield have an amazing on-screen chemistry together, particularly for a pair who have never played a romantic couple before. There’s a genuine-ness to their love that permeates their relationship regardless of whichever stage of their life you see them in. The same purity of affection that Tobias had when he first goes out with Almut is there when they face their biggest hurdles, and this is an endearing thing to see in a couple.
The story covers their ups and downs but does so non-linearly. The plot jumps back and forth between different eras or what you might call stages in their relationship. It can be confusing if you’re not a fan of the narrative style, but it does provide a change of pace from the typical romantic drama to see the effect of something before you find out the cause.
We see them with their daughter, yet when we jump into the past, we hear Almut say she doesn’t want kids. We immediately want to know how she changed her mind. Time jumps can often seem gimmicky, but they play into how we remember things and how memories shape our lives.
Time is a funny thing. It just seems to pass us by. We don’t remember everything, no matter how much we might want to. We can’t; there isn’t enough space in the average brain to remember everything in a lifetime. But the memories we do keep are the important ones. Meeting the love of your life, getting a new job, getting fired from a job, winning at something, having a child, and fighting an illness are all life experiences that define us.
The film also asks us to consider what happens when we run out of time. Suddenly, every moment is a big deal; every memory is a precious treasure. Time is a funny thing. And always, always, there never seems to be enough of it.
