We Live in Time

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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Get out your handkerchief … and a napkin. Here is a romantic drama about an upcoming chef battling with cancer and love.

“We Live in Time” is screening at Tropic Cinema.

Andrew Garfield (“The Amazing Spider-Man”) and Florence Pugh (“Black Widow”) star as the couple in question. Grace Delaney plays their daughter.

When an ice-skater-turned-fusion-chef hits a cereal-company sales rep with her car, she offers to cook him and his wife a meal as apology. Turns out Tobias Durand (Garfield) has just separated from his wife and winds up in bed with Almut Brühl (Pugh), leading to an ongoing love affair.

Despite ups and downs, the couple have a child (Delany), she gets ovarian cancer, she enters an international cooking competition, and a wedding gets bantered about.

“We Live in Time” isn’t told in chronological order, so viewers know the heartbreak coming, even when the characters don’t.

Rated as 80% fresh, Rotten Tomatoes summed it up: “Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh’s palpable chemistry will snatch audiences’ hearts before breaking them …”

Andrew Garfield says, “The story shows how grief rearranges your whole psyche and opens you up to the multitudinous ways of accessing and being in life.”

Garfield and Pugh’s chemistry “makes the tragic, romantic story come alive.”

Florence Pugh adds, “Everybody wants to ask us how we made this chemistry,” Pugh says with a smile. “Ultimately, the thing that we’ve landed on is that we both are so serious about what we do, and then we were just lit up by the other person also being serious by what they do. We were both free and ready to jump together.”

Director John Crowley says watching them work together was like “lightning in a bottle.”

How do you do that within the movie industrial system?

Pugh says, “Oh, my God, this feels so simple, so essential, so soulful, and full of spirit. It’s a really rare and beautiful thing.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com