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They’re usually two of the most dependable young stars around, but in this lumbering film Pugh and Garfield have little to no chemistry
1/5
“A film should have a beginning, middle and end,” Jean-Luc Godard once said, “but not necessarily in that order.” Perhaps the late master would have recanted if he’d lived to see this calamitous romantic weepie, whose big selling point – and, ultimately, also top-to-tail undoing – is that its plot unfolds out of sequence.
We Live in Time, which premiered at the London Film Festival tonight, stars Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, two of the most dependable young screen stars around, who have proven watchable in everything they’ve appeared in, no matter how patchy…until now. As Almut and Tobias, two 30-something lovers trying to make a life together against ultimately tragic odds, the two feel less like lovers than actors, trying to gin up some tenderness and heat that ends up persuading no one in the room, least of all themselves.
Both of their characters have microscopically specific jobs and backgrounds. Garfield’s Tobias is a divorced Weetabix sales rep, while Pugh’s Almut is a figure-skating prodigy turned Michelin star-winning chef who specialises in British-Bavarian fusion cuisine. Yet even after an hour and three quarters in their company, you’d be hard-pressed to describe any personality traits that wouldn’t appear on their CVs.
Pugh is driven. Garfield is sweet. Together they’re – I don’t know, conventionally attractive? The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.
But by jumbling the running order of Almut and Tobias’s relationship, Nick Payne’s screenplay deprives the audience of the simple, mushy pleasures of its conventionally sentimental arc. (Things are nice, then later, things are sad.) And here’s what proves doubly ruinous: director John Crowley, whose 2007 drama Boy A made Garfield’s name in the first place, can’t seem to work out what his film’s for without it.
Events that should be tear-jerking open goals, like the arrival of the couple’s much-longed-for daughter, are robbed of emotional weight – in that case, because the girl has already been gaily toddling around for half the film. Unfamiliar locations trigger regular cognitive scrambles, as the viewer tries to work out where exactly in the timeline they fit.
As for the hops back and forth through time themselves, the juxtapositions they create are by turns so lumbering and inane, I’m at a genuine loss as to what the intended effects were meant to be. We watch the couple undergo IVF, then – whoomp – we’re in another doctor’s office, where Almut hears her first round of chemotherapy has failed. (These might sound like spoilers, but both the pregnancy and cancer are spelled out in the film’s opening scenes.)
What cosmic wisdom is being imparted here? That good and bad things can both happen at the doctor’s? Or just that life is generally a bit of a tangle? As Godard didn’t ever say: well, duh. But if so, isn’t it art’s job to make the effort to unpick it?
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English