Still Time Parent Guide

Desperate to find his girlfriend before midnight at a New Year’s Eve party, Dante (Edoardo Leo) mistakenly kisses a stranger who happens to be wearing the same dress. His girlfriend dumps him on the spot, but the stranger, Alice (Barbara Ronchi), lets him buy her a drink as an apology for spontaneously smooching her. It turns out to have been a fortuitous mistake, as the two soon start dating and even move in together. Alice spends her days drawing and painting for children’s books, while Dante struggles to keep up in a fast-paced corporate environment – one which makes him late for the surprise party Alice threw for his birthday. He hopes to make it up to her the next day, but when he wakes up in the morning, it isn’t the next day. It’s his next birthday, and Alice is pregnant. While Dante scrambles to make sense of things, time slips past, leaving him to try and pick up the pieces of his life as they fly by.

On each birthday, Dante is increasingly disturbed by the changes that materialize around him – and is upset by the mess made by the Dante who lives most of his life. The only upside of losing so much so quickly is that Dante discovers the things he really cares about… which he might already have lost forever.

Netflix has a nearly identical movie already, Just Another Christmas, except that it’s Brazilian and the protagonist’s birthday is on Christmas – a holiday which he hates. Apart from those differences, almost every beat of this movie is the same. And, if you don’t happen to speak Italian or Portuguese, you’re going to be reading the same English subtitles anyway. Thankfully, the film they’re shamelessly cribbing isn’t too bad, if you don’t mind having your plots reheated for you.

For those of you who missed that Brazilian Christmas movie three years ago (or who didn’t read my review, shame on you), the film is mostly about appreciating the things that really matter in your life. Not your job, not your lifestyle, not your car, but the people you love. The character’s unpleasantly accelerated view of time lets him watch himself change in the eyes of those people, and see how that change hurts them and, ultimately, himself. As with Just Another Christmas, parents will probably want to watch out for the “you’re messing up your kids” guilt, now coupled with “you’re probably not doing enough for your own elderly parents” and “you’re probably missing out on your own life”. Children, on the other hand, should probably give this a miss. The film barely earns its TV-MA, mostly with a smattering of profanity and some casual smoking, but it’s emotionally intense in a way younger viewers won’t find fun. Most of it, frankly, it isn’t fun – but it can be surprisingly emotional.