British filmmaker Richard Curtis has written iconic pop-cultural classics like Mr. Bean, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary . His directorial debut, Love Actually , remains a rare film that at once parodies, celebrates, and reclaims, storytelling’s most bastardised genre. This is best reflected in the scene where Hugh Grant’s charming and awkward British Prime Minister character “stands up” to the crude entitlement of the visiting American President at a press conference. My lofty metaphor-seeking mind read this moment as: the wry English wit has publicly wrested back the quintessential romcom from the industrialised jowls of Hollywood. But Curtis’ most accomplished movie has everything and nothing to do with his reputation as the King of (Romantic) Comedy.
Of human foibles
About Time (2013), starring Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson in a breakthrough role, cleverly weaponises its maker’s stature. It counts on the fact that we anticipate an innovative (buzzword: time travel) but typically breezy love story. But the girl-boy arc fades into the background, and the film subverts our expectations by instead morphing into a deeply contemplative and winning tragedy about human nature. Curtis virtually uses his own career as a smokescreen to transform About Time into an affecting ode to closure and its elastic relationship with time.
Early in the film, a retired James (Bill Nighy) informs his son Tim, a boy on the verge of big-city adulthood, that the men of the family possess the power to travel back in time. Naturally, at first, Tim abuses this cosmic gift like any red-blooded, teething male hero would — to find, and refine, his pursuit of love. He meets Mary, an American girl, and manipulates time in a manner that compels her to fall for him. You’d imagine any writer at this point would be tempted to use time travel as the pivot to continue navigating the cross-cultural politics of companionship. But Curtis refrains from old-school gimmickry. He designs the narrative device as a trigger that forces Tim’s conflict to be conceived in the personal chasm that separates selfishness from selflessness: The selfishness of love from the selflessness of family. Three instances — where Tim must choose between the two — stand out.
Fast forward, rewind
The first time, Tim almost loses Mary because he decides to alter the fate of his misanthropic local guardian. In his bid to fix the family friend’s awry stage play, Tim misses his first date with Mary, and ends up having to relocate, and captivate, her all over again. His nobility almost erases his soulmate. Fortunately, he manages to be both selfless and selfish without compromising on the recipients of either trait. The second time, Tim is not as lucky. Soon after the birth of his daughter, he rewinds time to prevent his sister’s alarming road accident. He turns her to the right man at an old college party so that she becomes a happier person who isn’t reckless on the morning of her accident. However, this alternate upheaval disrupts the pattern of his own life: His daughter is now a son. On another day, the sperm seems to have reached another egg. In order to reclaim control over his own destiny, Tim reverses his selflessness. He undoes his sister’s happy ending and helps her recover from her mishap instead.
In effect, he chooses his own reality — his marriage, its holy continuity — over hers. The playful time-loop, evidently, terminates at the onset of new parenthood.
The third time, Tim is faced with his most serious test. After cancer claims James, Tim keeps revisiting him at different stages in their history to extend the father-son bond just a little more. He isn’t willing to let go. But Mary’s insistence on a third child means that Tim has to choose — between the birth of a heart and the death of a memory. Being a dad again implies that he cannot travel back in time to see his old man anymore. Appropriately, the conflict is reversed here: the selflessness of love versus the selfishness of family.
It is perhaps no coincidence that fatherhood is what persuades him to move on as a son. Until now, the choice had always been between family and love. But the two paths have finally converged: by choosing love again, he is also choosing a family.
Cinematic allegories
Tim’s story got me thinking: do some of us subconsciously fail to sustain romantic relationships because we’re unwilling to snap that umbilical cord? Do we postpone marriage — a family, children, onwardness — to preserve the fading remnants of our family? To keep our history accessible? The film’s lyrical circularity exposes an uncomfortable truth about life — that romance is inherently an act of self-preservation. That loving someone, often, is a mechanism aimed at leaving something – and some time — behind. We choose to get consumed by life so that its origins are exhumed no more. For every child Tim has, the more irrevocably he drifts away from his own childhood. Every birth is inextricably linked to his rebirth. For each milestone he crosses as a life partner, the rules of time travel — a cinematic allegory for the texture of remembrance — force him to live rather than relive. Love is, after all, the emotional manifestation of the precise moment the future decides to break up with the past.
