About Time

About Time (2013)

Written and Directed by: Richard Curtis
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams

It's a slice of life romantic comedy, but with the small add on of a time travel element. They don't treat the time travel element like sci-fi movies do, they seamlessly blend a fantasy element like that into the mundane. The film seems like an epic because of the span of events that the film covers. We see Tim growing up from a kid to a man having three kids, and feeding them. And I remember a beautiful cut, when they decide to have the third child, there is a transition shot and then it straight cuts to the woman having a bump. The voice over was beautifully written, with beautiful observations about life, my favorite one was - 'no matter how many times you travel in time, sometimes you can't make someone love you'. The Margot Robbie track was beautiful, the moment he knows that he didn't feel anything with such a gorgeous woman like her the second time he met her, he knew that the woman he was with was the one, because he realized what he felt with her is something no one else can make him feel. I like how the tone slowly goes from comedy, to romance, and then slowly to bittersweet.

It's beautifully shot as well, we don't see wide shots of landscapes or anything, we mostly see close shots of the people talking, creating an intimate experience, as if we are just sitting with them as they talk. The only time they use wide shots is when something is happening on the roads, but I remember thinking if the houses were small in size, but I realized that they shot it like that to create an intimate effect. I remember, Satyanshu Singh once told about how Anurag Kashyap gave a suggestion on how to fix an issue in Chintu Ka Birthday (2019) that the house they got was more spacious than they wanted. AK suggested them to make the characters whisper when they dub, so that subconsciously, the audience will feel that they are nearby to each other - which is why they're probably whispering.