Warning: spoilers ahead for We Live In Time.
Awards buzz surrounds Florence Pugh's latest film We Live In Time for a multitude of reasons, and not just because of her hilarious-yet-sweet chemistry with fellow lead Andrew Garfield on their press tour – and the viral “ugly carousel horse meme” on the movie's poster, which launched a whole other discourse of its own.
The film does what it says on the tin in terms of its marketing as a tearjerker. Its plot, after all, follows the chance encounter (via car crash, specifically) of a couple in their 30s who fall in love and navigate life together. But we discover fairly early on that Florence’s character Almut has contracted an aggressive form of cancer. The couple grapple with how to fight it, and – later on – what this means for their family.
But We Live In Time does more than just document the journey that Almut and Tobias (Garfield) go on. It asks how we define a life well lived, especially if we know that ours might be coming to an end soon. Is it found through finding fulfilment in a successful career, a life of travel and adventure, a thriving and happy family? Can it be all three, or more than just one, if you're a woman?
As Almut asks herself questions like this, we are in turn met with society’s obsession with motherhood consuming your full identity when you become a mother – and the shame that you’re hit with if you are seen to prioritise any other part of your life at any point. Without any judgment applied on any particular character, it portrays perfectly the different ways in which women are stigmatised and pressured as mothers to sacrifice parts of themselves.
When Florence's Almut realises how serious her illness is, she resolves to fight for excellence and success in her career as a chef with the time she has left. She enters the Bocuse d’Or competition – a global chef championship – without telling her family. Later in the film, when she forgets to pick up her daughter from daycare, she is vilified by Tobias for forgetting – which is understandable, but what isn't is the subsequent shaming that follows… for not living up to her identity as a mother and, to him, choosing her career over her daughter.
The scene escalates into an intense argument between the couple, where Almut lays bare her desperation to leave a legacy for her daughter. She screams: “Did it ever occur to you that I don’t want to be just someone’s dead f**king mum?” Her agony lies in her desperation to prove to her daughter that she didn’t give up, but also the fear that she will be forgotten.
It’s a devastating moment. And, zooming out from Almut’s specific situation, it highlights the plight of so many women who – due to patriarchal societal norms – come to be viewed entirely through the lens of motherhood after giving birth. Their desire for a full, varied life – one that any man with a child would never be denied – is consumed by their prominent identity of being a mother. Almut faces vilification for “neglecting” her child, but it’s more complicated than that. Especially if her life is drawing to a close, why wouldn’t it be more important than ever to fight for whatever legacy she wanted? Especially as so much of it is tied to how she wants her daughter to remember her?
Garfield’s Tobias doesn’t initially understand this, and also asks her insensitive questions about her fertility earlier on in the film and their relationship – which Almut meets with a “f**k you for even asking”. He isn’t portrayed as a “bad” or anti-feminist character singularly, though – rather as an embodied reflection of the way societal expectations can screw over women when it comes to expectations around fertility and motherhood.
We Live In Time’s story brings into sharp relief the unnecessary injustices that women live through as a result of becoming mothers, in a world where we must shoulder deeply pervasive social stigma, a gender pay gap and multiple career roadblocks when returning to work after giving birth. According to research by charity Pregnant Then Screwed, 52% of mothers say they have faced some form of discrimination when pregnant, on maternity leave or when they returned to work.
Florence is, of course, the perfect actor to take on this patriarchal norm and portray it sensitively for the screen – having been vocal throughout her career, and particularly recently, about medial misogyny, its impact on women’s health, as well as the mistreatment of women in Hollywood and the wider entertainment industry and how it has impacted her.
She has spoken out about being dismissed by a gynaecologist when seeking treatment for what was eventually diagnosed as PCOS, as well as calling attention to the double standards and toxic stereotypes applied to women in the entertainment industry.
“There are fine lines women have to stay within, otherwise they are called a diva, demanding, problematic,” she said recently in an interview with The Times. “And I don’t want to fit into stereotypes made by others.” She also highlighted the horrific ways that actors like herself and Keira Knightley are criticised for showing signs of ageing, or not looking the way that society believes they should.
We urgently need better education on the impact PCOS has on our bodies and minds.
Her performance as Almut is visceral, clearly instilled with the determination to rebel against society’s expectations of women and to forge a new path that makes way for different perceptions of motherhood, encouraging attitudes that support woman’s ability to live a multi-faceted life.
Florence herself has been clear on her mission to challenge ideas on how women were perceived. “I just wanted to be there, to make space for a version of a person that isn’t all the things they used to have to be,” she has said of pushing back against these stereotypes throughout her career.
The story she tells in We Live In Time does just this – through the prism of a love story, it draws attention to society's narrow, heavy expectation of women and motherhood, and who we can and should be. And encourages us to fight for more for ourselves.
We Live In Time is out in cinemas now.
