One constant in John Crowley’s episodic love story is the preparing and sharing of meals. Culinary experiments bring flavour to the central couple’s relationship, and create enduring, Proustian memories, writes Meg Walters.
This article contains spoilers for ‘We Live in Time’.
On the big screen, the recipe for love almost always includes a good meal. Annie Hall’s (1977) runaway lobsters evoke the bubbly joy of the early days of a love affair. The tennis racket-strained spaghetti in The Apartment (1960) summons up the chaotic, cosy domesticity of a couple who is simply meant to be. The roadside, fried-chicken picnic in To Catch a Thief (1955) peels back the glamor of its leads (Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, of course), giving an unexpected glimpse of intimacy. The poisonous-mushroom omelette in Phantom Thread (2017) becomes a symbol of obsession and control, evoking the darker side of love.
The Apartment (1960)
Cinema is filled with such romantic foodie moments, moments that remind us that the acts of preparing and enjoying food have a singular way of bringing a love story to life on screen. After all, there is nothing more sensuous – or indeed sensual – than cooking for, or eating with, another person. Lust, love, affection, intimacy, yearning… it can all be captured in a single taste.
Perhaps that’s why so many romances don’t just feature food, they actually revolve around it. Last year’s The Taste of Things saw a pair of 19th-century French cooks falling in love as they concocted breathtaking meals for each other. Nora Ephron’s thinly veiled autobiography Heartburn (1986) tells the story of her divorce by tracing the meals she made – famously, it ends with Jack Nicholson (deservedly) taking a key lime pie to the face. In Chocolat (2000), Juliette Binoche plays a chocolatier whose heady romance, like her chocolate shop, butts up against the puritanical moralism of the town where she lives.
The Taste of Things (2023)
The cinematic love affair between food and romance is one that director John Crowley understands all too well in We Live in Time. The food-centric romantic drama traces the romance between Andrew Garfield’s Tobias, a ‘regular guy’ with a regular, albeit food-industry, job (in the boring, west-London sort of way), and Florence Pugh’s Almut, a chef and a bohemian, artistic type (in the trendy, south-east-London sort of way).
Like many on-screen romances that have come before it, the film uses food as a metaphor for the pair’s unlikely connection: Tobias is a soon-to-be divorced corporate guy, sleepwalking from one day to the next. ‘Mr Weetabix’, as Almut and her friends teasingly call him, lives a life as bland as the breakfast-cereal company he works for – that is, until he is introduced to the colourful Almut. (In their charmingly chaotic meet-cute, Almut runs him over with her car.)
We Live in Time (2024)
Very quickly, food becomes a symbol of her impact on him. When he tastes her Bavarian sausage, a new world of flavour (and possibility) suddenly opens up before him. One bite, and his deadened eyes suddenly fill with new life. The obligatory falling-in-love montage sees the couple gleefully browsing a Herne Hill market where Almut shows Tobias unusual cheeses, funky chutneys and exotic fruits. See? she seems to be telling him, Life can be fun!
Tobias, it appears, has never been one to experiment in the kitchen – or, indeed, in life. When Almut teaches him her egg-cracking technique – always on a flat surface, always with two bowls – the moment is so intimate, so much an expression of her, he can’t help but lift her up and kiss her there and then in the kitchen. After Almut is diagnosed with cancer, she stubbornly decides to compete in the Bocuse d’Or, an international cooking competition, as a way to reinforce her own personhood before her death. At first sceptical, Tobias eventually comes to understand its importance, and supports her through the gruelling contest.
We Live in Time (2024)
While all of this follows a pretty standard foodie-romance blueprint, We Live in Time introduces a new, poetic element into the mix: the steady march of time. The film skips back and forth through months and years, showing us snapshots of the couple’s journey out of chronological order. And what holds it all together? Food.
Evidently, food is ephemeral by nature, following the rules of time. It is made, it is eaten, then it is gone. When Almut finally finishes the Bocuse d’Or, realisation passes over her face – the final challenge she set for herself in life has been completed. She has made her last meal and won’t get to do it again. And so, the transient side of food reflects her own inevitable mortality.
But even though food may be fleeting, there’s another way of looking at it. A recipe can endure throughout, and even outside of, time, just as strong emotions can. In We Live in Time, food has a way of repeating over the years, since we see different iterations of the same dish across multiple periods. This strange persistence of food brings out the bittersweet poetry of the couple’s journey.
We Live in Time (2024)
The final scene contains one particularly poignant example of food repetition, as Tobias keeps the memory of the deceased Almut alive by teaching their daughter her egg-cracking method. Time marches on but, in a poetic, Proustian sense, food can keep a moment and an emotion from the past alive long after the original meal has been eaten.
The poetry of We Live In Time comes from this delicate dance: food itself may not last, but the emotions associated with it still endure – just as our own limited lives can sometimes seem to stretch beyond their temporal limitations thanks to our most profound relationships. Almut’s life was made of moments and meals, but her memory, and the memory of those meals, lives on.
WATCH WE LIVE IN TIME IN CINEMAS
