About time, endearing romantic comedy from the director of Love Actually.
Both in his role as a writer of films like Notting Hill, and in his role as director of Love Actually and The Boat That Rocked, Richard Curtis has always been reliable for treating type romantic comedy, because their romantic entanglement frames always have something more behind. That’s exactly what happens with About Time, a film which presents the characteristics of a comedy family group, then introduced the key fantastic journey through time, develops into romantic comedy and finally ends its route, with consistency, where it began: in the family.
Thus, what might have been the typical story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, actually becomes a story of parents and children, husbands and wive, brothers and sisters. All this in a key characters and situations that are especially more or less close, despite the narrative device of time travel, which serves only as a tool to start the tradition is far from being the artifice to which we are accustomed to the science fiction movies.
As it did in the case of Love Actually, the engine of the cast is the director in that overflowing personality on camera that is the great Bill Nighy, an actor capable of lifting an entire plot, as impossible as it is, simply winking an eye or raising an eyebrow. Incidentally, seeing him explaining the process of time travel fiction his son, Domhall Gleeson (son of Brendan Gleeson, another great actor of our day), I found it impossible not to think that Nighy would be an excellent Doctor Who because in this film is the perfect bridge between the manners and getting fantastic fable accept this approach as spectators travel all the time that the writer-director seems to want to forget as soon as possible to get into what really interests of its history, that is human relationships, how we live, how we spend our time, and especially how we burn our lives without realizing it, living different times and days of the same with too rushed to enjoy them. And sometimes even are doing several things at once. Lack of time is thus the real engine of this love story which concerns not only the couple but also the affection between parents, children and siblings. And finally one of the film out before heading remembering table tennis with father tangles with blond sentimental turn.
About time also has a very defining scene of all the key films of this writer and director, who once so cynical as ours has the guts to raise a cinema that speaks of the family as the center of their stories. I mean the way they solve the second meeting of the protagonist with Charlotte, the impossibly beautiful Margot Robbie (her appear on the screen automatically shot me in the head Shoot Thrill, AC/DC ). The interesting thing is not so much as the protagonist reacts to the temptation of Charlotte (you know, AC / DC: i got my gun at the ready, gonna fire at will), but the decision taken as a screenwriter Richard Curtis to the possibility of carrying his comedy by one way or another: give in to the temptation to assemble a triangle romantic entanglement in plan ? You have to see the movie to know because I will not do a spoiler, but notice that construction is a time in history that defines the entire film and its protagonist. And by the way, when you see it, ask yourself what would you have done, which is something I always liked Curtis plant in their scripts: putting traps the viewer. It’s another way of getting involved in their stories even more .
Facing Margot Robbie have the other engine sentimental plot, Mary, played by Rachel McAdams. The two females are alternative paths for the hero of About Time, but the love story going the other way. And so Richard Curtis gets back some of the tone of the film by Frank Capra at the same time giving another twist to the romantic comedy a more solid looking for him at his usual simplistic approaches emotional trap.
As for the time travel, is the example of European cinema ‘s ability to deal with more flexibility and maturity narrative resources of different genres against clear inclination stiffness usually proposed commercial American cinema . Curtis even allowed the luxury of including a nod in the dialogue: Nighy talking about the butterfly effect. Do not expect complex narrative style loops Looper or mirror universes of Star Trek style in this story that fable about the possibility of time travel as a resource only to tell us about people and their feelings.
Miguel Juan Payán
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