Review of We Live In Time: Florence Pugh delights in un-cheesy death-romance drama

With her throaty laughter that is at least an octave lower than her normal speech, it seems as if Florence Pugh could simply defy anything. In “We live in time” This is a big deal for Almut, played by the “Midsommar” star: In her mid-30s, a medical examination reveals that she has stage three ovarian cancer. Treatment with chemotherapy and surgery would be exhausting and time-consuming, and a successful outcome is uncertain.

Together with her partner Tobias (Andrew Garfield), she must decide whether to agree to therapy or accept the illness, which will mean spending the rest of her life not in the hospital but with her family. And how should the two of them talk about it with their young daughter? Maybe, jokes Alma, you should give her an older dog. After all, the death of pets prepares children to be able to deal with the loss of loved ones later on.

Since “Love Story” at the latest, a mixture of illness drama and relationship romance has been part of the genre repertoire of mainstream cinema – but this combination is rarely really successful, and the cinematic portrayal of illness is usually too cumbersome and clichéd. With surprise commercial successes such as “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Only with You”, such films eventually migrate to the young adult sector, perhaps in the hope that younger viewers in the tangle of post-pubescent emotions will be more receptive to the kitsch potential of such material (looking back, I can certainly confirm this for myself).

It is all the more remarkable that director John Crowley has largely managed to achieve this balance with “We Live In Time”. The key to this is a simple narrative trick: he does not tell the story of Almut and Tobias chronologically as a relationship story moving towards an unstoppable end. Instead, he works with loosely arranged, interrelated snapshots that oscillate between the tentative feelings of a budding love and the deeper-rooted emotions of a longer partnership.

A unity-like lightness

Their first meeting begins like the classic material of a romantic comedy: Almut drives her car into Tobias, who is running onto the road. He wandered around in his bathrobe at night, munching on chocolate biscuits that were supposed to make the lengthy divorce process with his wife more bearable. The next day they meet again in Alma's newly opened restaurant: they tried a British variation of Bavarian dishes (like white sausages with lemon mustard), and he recently started working for a breakfast cereal company. The film shows what results from this using individual moments and from the end, unsentimental and sensitive at the same time.

Haute cuisine and industrial breakfast production: this is an immediately obvious, not very subtle contrast, such as one finds in many pulp fiction novels – for great film melodramas and romantic comedies, be it by Douglas Sirk or Nora Ephron, it has always been the best basis. The director John Crowley, who had already proven himself as a veteran of well-tempered romantic films with “Brooklyn”, clearly mastered the change between tones, and so it is precisely a non-cheesy lightness, which has become rare in cinematic dramas, that is the clear strength of “We Live on Time”.

Studio Canal

The two main actors play their roles with an almost cheerful caution and unaffected intimacy, with Florence Pugh in particular giving her character a lively, resistant robustness. It is only in the second half that the film cannot do without some unnecessary exaggerations: without telling Tobias, Alma, already marked by her health, agrees to take part in the Bocuse d'or competition, a kind of culinary Olympics, in which she is to represent the United Kingdom. Crowley perhaps handles the resulting conflict a little too routinely and predictably, but one would still like to forgive that in a film that is otherwise one of the more successful examples of melodramatic cinema in recent times.

Conclusion: Between relationship romance and illness drama, John Crowley succeeds in creating a routine melodrama with “We Live In Time”, which is carried by a pleasantly un-cheesy lightness.