Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh in a beautiful romance

I went into We Live in Time expecting a romance. And while the latest film from Brooklyn Director John Crowley Is The story of Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) is a romance and also about how a single moment in life can feel like it lasts an eternity and ends in an instant. The calm and powerful film made me ask: What does it mean that time moves forward and often leaves us behind? Unfolding in a series of scenes presented out of chronological order, We Live in Time is a reminder that the best moments must pass for the worst moments to pass.

We meet Almut (a chef specializing in modern European cuisine) and Tobias (a man who sells the most sensible of British breakfast foods, Weetabix) when their relationship is several years old. The ambitious Almut and the cautious Tobias work together so harmoniously that it's an entertaining shock when we later learn that they met after she accidentally hit him with her car. The stars have instantaneous chemistry. Pugh and Garfield embody these lovers with passion and playfulness, anchored in the reality of everyday life and everyday conversations. There's no melodrama here: Instead, “We Live in Time” falls over us like a heavy blanket of a couple's simple joys and simple tragedies. Their love story is not the sweeping, dramatic love story of Titanic or The Notebook – its power lies in its silence. A relationship is more than its grand gestures and in fact it is the practical decisions that Almut and Tobias make together for the future that show the strength of their bond.

One surprise that stands out for me: the film's use of nudity. Pugh and Garfield talked about filming a specific sex scene in We Live in Time – just the two of them on set with cameraman Stuart Bentley. Sex in this film is not intended to be suggestive or lurid; What makes these moments between Almut and Tobias passionate is their passionate desire for each other, the giddiness of their lovemaking in the past and present. Intimacy means vulnerability, and Bentley captures that beautifully. The body is a subject here, not an object. In a beautiful scene, Tobias and the heavily pregnant Almut bathe together with a lightness that shows us a couple who feel equally comfortable emotionally and physically when they are naked together.

Despite the novel presentation, this is a relatively straightforward story. The components are well known: couple meets, falls in love, has a child, survives a potentially fatal illness together. But these ordinary events are given added impact by the way We Live in Time shakes them up. One moment Almut could be in her 40th week of pregnancy. In the next one, you might see one of the couple's early dates.

There are no real visual signs of when any of this is happening – no title cards, no on-screen dates – other than changing hairstyles and the presence of her daughter Ella (Grace Delaney). Yet this non-linear timeline worked so well for me. Life is made up of moments, and the moments are what we remember, but no one thinks about their memories in the right order. Almut's central conflict lies in how she will be remembered. As her cancer progresses, she behaves irrationally, sometimes even a little selfishly. But We Live in Time isn't interested in calling them out for something entirely natural. Pugh gives a heartbreakingly earnest portrayal of Almut as she rages against the idea of ​​death, even though there is still so much to achieve. She is by no means a tragic figure, and her refusal to be seen as such – and the steps she takes to ensure that she does not live on in Tobias and Ella's memories in this way – are effective.

Almut and Tobias are a couple that I will remember for a long time. Pugh and Garfield are a force together and play these characters with such care that I never doubted their devotion to one another. We Live In Time is a magnificent meditation on memory and life that explores the complexities of our approach to the passage of time. Our lives will last forever, our lives will soon be over: both can be true, and it's nice to be reminded that the moments we live in can only ever be experienced once.

We live in the time gallery