Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.One day, a movie may be made about the triumphant press tour carried out by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield to promote their non-linear romcom We Live in Time. A model of platonic chemistry, the bright young English actors soon became TikTok fixtures. The film may feel an anticlimax by comparison. The stars are perhaps an inch less adorable than their actual characters, south Londoners Tobias and Almut.The com before the rom is wilfully prosaic. On the night boy meets girl, we see Garfield’s Tobias as a member of the IT team at breakfast cereal maker Weetabix. That level of specificity keeps coming in a script with a habit of dropping British brand names. Terry’s Chocolate Orange, Jaffa Cakes and Celebrations are just some of the ingredients that up the movie’s sugar content.Now the male lead is glumly stuck in a mid-range hotel. Soon, serial mishaps end with a slapstick road accident. Naturally, Pugh is driving. But the love story that follows will surprise you even less than you’d think.In the film’s high concept, we have by now already met the couple further on in their relationship. In one earlier scene, they are about to have their first child. In another, restaurateur Almut is diagnosed with cancer. The story sees beginning, middle and what might be the end all mixed up together. Tonally, actual tragedy sits beside the comic variety. (More car trouble awaits; Garfield gets in a fluster.)The result is neither as interesting or as misjudged as it might be. The tricksy structure comes to feel like jumping ahead to the end of a novel while still reading the rest: perfectly doable, but why would you want to? Using the gravity of serious illness in what is really a lightly scrambled Richard Curtis movie feels the bigger risk. In practice, the problem is more the confused nature of Pugh’s character. Luckily, the actor is as spirited as ever: erratic only in her taste in projects.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas now
