The actors' ball
In Love in the presentwhile desperately looking for a pen to sign his divorce papers, Tobias (Andrew Garfield) is hit by Almut's (Florence Pugh) car. Despite his fairly severe physical after-effects due to this absurd situation, Tobias's gaze immediately displays a tenderness tinged with admiration for Almut, before a game of ping-pong begins.
If we wanted, we could have fun detailing the slightest micro-expression of this fantasy duo of actors, as if the most subtle instructions came to life before our eyes. It is obviously on their shoulders that rests Love in the presentand John Crowley is well aware of this. Whether he films Garfield and Pugh in an assemblage of idyllic sketches or during longer, more painful discussions, we say to ourselves that we could watch them together for hours, and follow them to the ends of the earth.
Much of this commitment is due to the truth, or at least the feeling of the raw truth of these performances. Despite often being staged on the shoulder, we feel the meticulousness of an editing very attentive to its actors and their body language. There is a comforting closeness with which we identify immediately, especially as Crowley mischievously plays with the public image reflected by each person. While Florence Pugh has many times shared her love of cooking on social networks (Almut is a chef), Andrew Garfield spoke in an interview about his discovery of a masculine vulnerability that is still too often silenced, particularly after the death of his mother. .
In this way, Love in the present very naturally instills a form of inversion compared to the gender codes expected of the heterosexual melodrama. The film moves the lines in its own way, to the point where we are surprised to see this cinema couple embodied in a deep mutual respect. It may seem stupid, but rather than absolutely looking for shouting matches, oppositions and conflict, many scenes show them together, sharing everythingwhether it concerns small everyday moments or more important ordeals (this wonderful montage around pregnancy tests expected together).
Loveception
In fact, John Crowley could have gone all the way with this “anti-narrative” approach given the charisma of Garfield and Pugh, but his film cannot get rid of the tear-jerking melodrama. Like a flower from which the petals are removed little by little, the story is structured out of disorder to mark the parallels.
Somewhere between the symbolism of Nolan and the dreaminess of Malick, the montage wants to make us feel the subjectivity of our perception of time. To reinforce this process revolving around our short stay on Earth, the scenario chooses a massive issue. Almut has cancer, and the film logically begins with the recurrence of her illness, like the start of a disorderly countdown.
Unfortunately, the device quickly shows its limitsespecially when compared to other recent proposals. As a medium that has the ability to recreate and linger on moments of life, cinema never ceases to evoke, like an unattainable dream, the desire to fully connect with it, to pay attention to every scrap, even the most insignificant.
That's all the magic Here by Robert Zemeckis manages to translate, with his single fixed shot navigating through time in a falsely arbitrary way. Behind the beauty of the banal and the familiar/family, there is also the weight of regrets, and the too-late realization of having missed important moments, which the spectator has the chance to catch at the moment. flight.
Love in the present is fogged in this same emergencyand by that of seeing its characters try to live their existence in the most complete and satisfying way. Unfortunately, this haste attenuates – especially in the second half – the more trivial and innocent moments, in favor of the obligatory passages of a heteronormative couple's life (the marriage proposal, the birth of a child, etc.).
Therefore, the temporal explosion of the scenario has more the appearance of tactics and artificeto disguise the general sobriety of his writing. Crowley sometimes chooses to wallow in emotional ease (Tobias who shaves Almut's hair before his chemotherapy in a burst of overly lyrical staging), but almost always makes up for it thanks to the finesse of his actors. That remains the most important thing: while Tobias and Almut fall in love, we learn to love them in turn.
