Such are the surprises of love. Almut and Tobias, Londoners, meet by chance and accident. But love is rarely simple: life takes care of complicating it. The heartfelt portrait of a marriage, written by playwright Nick Payne and filmed by John Crowley, illustrates a universal truth: we experience love in fits and starts, outside of any linear logic, in fleeting, unforgettable moments – beautiful, funny, sad.
The film interweaves, crosses and re-crosses three timelines of the lives of this man and this woman, which each carry three themes: romance; parenthood; the disease. Or the couple, the family and their pain. All composed with the idea that at each moment, the love that unites them is experienced in the present – hence the programmatic title of the film.
Sometimes confusing
Everything would be crystal clear if the story was structured into three distinct parts. But no, we come and go between the different moments of this relationship, and it's sometimes complicated to navigate. The story is told with incessant, scattered jumps in time. Filmmaker John Crowley chooses a very fragmented narrative, mixing eras in a sort of temporal chaos. The viewer follows these scattered fragments while trying to put the pieces back together, like a puzzle to put together. This process is reminiscent of the cinema of Christopher Nolan (Memento, Inception), where time becomes a malleable matter.
Breaking the chronology has an advantage: thus, an ordinary story – to love, to live, to die – is transformed into a daring work thanks to its unconventional structure. Irish director John Crowley wanted to experiment with tonal shifts through the non-linear structure of his film: “I hope that by the end it feels like you've seen something from six angles at the same time, almost as if we were seeing a cubist painting. » This choice requires constant attention: the narrative gaps are only completed at the very end, making the film sometimes confusing. Fortunately, Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield carry the feature film brilliantly: she, dazzling; him, all in nuances. Together they harmonize.
Love in the present by John Crowley, in theaters this Wednesday, January 1. Duration: 1 hour 48 minutes.
