As Evie struggles with the weird and wonderful effects of time on her life and relationships, it becomes clear that time is playing its most annoying trick of all: it’s running out.
We all try to make sense of time in our lives, until we just give up and let time get the better of us. Directed by Ivan Barge and written by Matthew Harris (previously featured 43,000 Feet) is a narrative montage which discusses the subjectivity of time by following a couple from the beginning of their relationship and throughout their lives. We see through the eyes of the female narrator as she struggles to come to terms with the funny and sometimes painful discrepancies between measured-time and time as she really experiences it.
From the agonising (morning-after time, microwave-time) to the merely annoying (snooze-time, holiday-time), as Evie’s life progresses and her relationships change, her experience of time gets even more confusing. The significant events in her early life become more distant until she arrives at the ‘contradiction-time’ of old-age: the days seem to creep by, but the years seem to be getting shorter and shorter.
Time is something we all try to figure out, but no one has ever quite understood it until this day, Tom O’Brian, America’s official timekeeper at the National Institute of Standards and Technology said to NPR.org that “My own personal opinion is that time is a human construct” and that to him, days, hours, minutes and seconds are a way for humanity to “put some order in this very fascinating and complex universe around us.” In Snooze Time Ivan does not try to make sense of time, rather he uses softened cinematography to shape out the imperfections of time while blatantly swooping us through the character’s lives.
