Does Almut die in the end?

Almut’s reasoning is not about ambition, but about conviction. She doesn’t want to stumble to the end of this story. She wants her daughter to remember her for all her vitality, talent and joy of life. She wants to spend her final months not fearing the specter of death, but rather respecting its finality. If their saga must end, why should it end on a note that is anything but profound – even if that is what “profound” is? We live in time argues again and again, is often found in the smallest and gentlest phenomena?

When Almut’s competition arrives, Tobias has promised her his full support. He gave up his own dream – that the two would get married in a ceremony in front of their loved ones – in favor of Almut’s dream. He and her daughter Ella cheer her on from the crowd as she rushes between stations on the chef’s podium, her strength exhausted as the clock ticks down. Just a few moments before the timer rings, Almut’s inspector Jade enters and serves the last dishes. Despite the thrill of that moment and the strength it took to get there, Almut doesn’t stay to find out the results of the competition. The audience will never know the outcome of this fictional Bocuse d’Or because – as Almut knows – it was never about the result.

Instead, Almut leaves the competition area with Tobias and Ella at her side and visits a nearby ice rink together. As Crowley reveals midway through his film, Almut was once an accomplished figure skater herself, spurred on by her father, who died when she was young. In the years since his death, she has avoided skating; The memory of him had embedded itself in the sport and paralyzed her. But just a few moments after the adrenaline rush at the Bocuse d’Or, Almut slips on a pair of ice skates and goes out on the ice with her partner and their child. She does this effortlessly, as if she never stopped. She doesn’t run from death, but she doesn’t succumb to it either. As she breaks away from Tobias and Ella and spins in graceful circles, she crosses an invisible gap in the rink. That line that the audience doesn’t see but still feels, separates Almut from her family. They look at each other from opposite sides of this divide. Almut raises her arm and waves. Nothing needs to be said for this exchange to be understood as a farewell.

Almut’s death is never explicitly acknowledged We live in timeand I think that’s one of the most elegant decisions in the film. It’s possible, of course, that she lives on, but the script’s implications are too clear to ignore. In the final scene, Tobias and Ella go alone into the kitchen that they once shared with Almut. There is a dog with them, another sign that Almut is no longer with them: In earlier scenes, Tobias and Almut discuss why getting a dog could help Ella cope with her mother’s death.

In this final tableau, Tobias stands with his daughter over the kitchen counter and shows her how to properly crack an egg – using exactly the same method that Almut once taught him. In this house, Almut is not forgotten, even if it is many months or years after her presumed death. In a concrete sense, she insists on the way Tobias and Ella care for each other in her absence. Ultimately, Almut’s goal wasn’t to secure one final career award. Instead, it was about reminding herself and her family what all this living, losing and loving is for. You can’t avoid time, but you can inhabit it.

There is nothing particularly new about the story of Tobias and Almut We live in time ourselves. This is a romance we’ve seen before – for some of us, dozens of times. Even Crowley’s muddled timeline is more of an emotional tool than a cinematic one. I can understand why people accuse the film of being uninteresting, clumsy and dour. But I found that the simplicity, especially in TimeThe last sequence was beneficial to its beauty. We live in timeEven though he is indeed a tearjerker, he doesn’t try to manipulate his audience into a hypocritical flood of tears. There is no trick to be uncovered here. Garfield and Pugh’s undeniable chemistry elevates the project far beyond what it could have been without them, but also protects the integrity of its intentions. As Garfield himself said during a question-and-answer session following the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of that year: We live in time is about the “uncanny secret of wanting to be here” and all the extraordinary ways in which that is possible – in life and in death.

Lauren Puckett-Pope is a culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.