According to Casper with Edwards, there are five time periods in Two for the Road. I would love to categorize these periods to three phases for every ordinary couple: in love wondering whether to be married or not, in marriage wondering whether to have a child or not, being parents wondering whether to divorce or not. Instead of displaying the changes of relationship in a chronological order, the film uses a lot of cross-cutting in terms of same space but a different time. Flashing back and forth to what happened before and after in the same journey for ten years, audience gain a more thorough sensation that it is the memory, along with other factors, in a relationship that keeps people together.

The director, Stanley Donen, puts the scenes together depending on the content and themes of the shots of the different period. Many of the interesting cuts won’t connect due to the spatial and temporal discontinuity, as Professor Casper lectured. In order to let the audience be aware of the change of time, characters have different clothes, hairstyle and cart types. For instance, when Joanna asked Mark “What kind of people would sit like that without a word to say to each other?”, Mark replied married people, then the next scene is that married Mark and Joanna not talking to each other while dining. Another example is when they don’t have a car, they imagined if they own a car in future they will definitely offer people on the road a drive, then the next scene is that they drive fastly across the same bridge, ignoring a couple on the road. All these cuttings add the humor of the movie.