Every generation gets the cancer romance it deserves. In We Live in Time, which features a tender sex scene scored to a song by the singer of The xx, terminal illness gives an extra sense of urgency to an echt-millennial story about the push-pull of professional ambition and family obligation, and the competitive drive to self-actualize in a creative profession — about the desire to make the most of the time you have.
Almut (Florence Pugh) is a chef who starts the film by whipping up a “Douglas fir parfait” and ends it tweezing microgreens onto a deconstructed seafood tower; in between, she earns a rave from Jay Rayner and a Michelin star for her “modern European takes on classic alpine dishes,” such as an amuse-bouche of weisswurst with lemon mustard gel. If We Live in Time must indulge in the played-out gastro trend, it has the right actress with which to do so: as anyone who watched her Instagram videos during lockdown will know, Miss Flo can crack an egg one-handed like a pro.
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She and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) meet cute when she Meet Joe Blacks him with her car as he wanders out into traffic to pick up a piece of chocolate orange; she’s a magnetic chef on the rise and he’s a newly divorced sadsack, and it’s difficult to see what she sees in him aside from a screenwriterly contrivance. (The original screenplay is by Nick Payne.) She feeds him well, he eats it up; she offers excitement and pleasure, and he keeps her regular (he works for Weetabix), donning readers and assiduously taking notes at all her doctor’s appointments.
The film unfolds over three timelines, delineated, as per tradition, by Almut’s three distinct hairstyles. Across their courtship, they argue over whether they should continue their relationship given their asymmetric feelings about having children — he wants them, but she’s not sure, until her first ovarian cancer diagnosis, and the option of a full hysterectomy, scares her into fertility; the twee score by Bryce Dessner of The National (of course) swells when the pregnancy test finally returns a positive result.
On the day their daughter is born, director John Crowley pushes epic setpieces: pulling the Mini out of a tight parking space to drive to the hospital; Tobias feeding Almut jaffa cakes in the bath between contractions; and an epic birth in a petrol station loo, with Pugh on all fours in just a bra and massive pregnancy prosthetic, screaming and sweating and pushing in a suitably virtuoso performance – onscreen and off, Pugh navigates her fame with a constant aura of Main Character Energy, which fits the driven Almut and gives the film an appealingly substantial melodramatic scope.
Over the months when Almut’s cancer returns, Almut shaves her head rather than lose her hair — we see Pugh receive the baby-butch buzzcut that she sported so strikingly at last year’s Met Gala, with Garfield himself manning the clippers alongside the toddler who plays their daughter, in a scene that plays like a domestic idyll on the grounds of their cozy country cottage. The drama of this timeline hinges on Almut’s decision to secretly enter an elite cooking competition while undergoing chemotherapy (“I’m in training for the Bocuse d’Or,” she finally confesses, in a hushed, tearful yet steely voice); her dedication to her vocation, even more so than her treatment or family in the time left, sparks the major marital fight in the film.
Ticking clocks, literal and metaphorical, are the major motif here: a thirtysomething career woman’s biological clock and the minutes between contractions; the kitchen timers counting down the minutes to service, and seconds left in the competition to which Almut stakes her legacy; the life expectancy of a cancer patient who is no longer responding to the chemo, and how many more achievements, or memories, she can hope to pack in.
The time-hopping chronology is, ostensibly, an elaborate structural conceit in conversation with the film’s theme, but it feels largely random, or rather manipulative – a way for the narrative to withhold reveals and build to three climaxes instead of one, and a way to hopscotch from highlight to highlight whenever things threaten to become too prosaic. Both actors are the wrong age for their characters – Pugh is too young for all but Almut’s earliest scenes at 28, Garfield too old for all but Tobias’s latest scenes at 41 – but both are outside aging in a moisturized movie-star kind of way, so the film seems to just float from highlight like a Greatest Hits album with an achronological track listing.
This is simply a generic and brutally efficient tearjerker — like its title, it aspires to archetypal grandeur and lands somewhere blander. Hardly destined to be a generational touchstone, it will nevertheless serve as a usefully dated document for future viewers, with its food-porn obsession, lush and morose minor-key twee music, and the dynamic between its high-achieving millennial woman and devoted Wife Guy.
