Movie Review: Our Time

Our Time **** / *****

Directed by: Carlos Reygadas.

Starring: Natalia López (Esther), Carlos Reygadas (Juan), Phil Burgers (Phil), Maria Hagerman (Lorena), Yago Martínez (Juan - hijo).

 

There are some directors who take years between movies, and you wish they would work a little faster – produce a little more. And then there are filmmakers like Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas, so seemingly takes five years between each movies, and that’s about right. You wouldn’t want to necessarily dive into a new Reygadas film every year – they demand a lot from you – and it’s not always clear that they will deliver. His latest, for example, is called Our Time – and is a three-hour film about a couple’s failed experiment with an open relationship. That Reygadas cast himself as the man, and his own wife Natalia Lopez to play the couple, and their own children to play the couples children – and neither are really actors – may lead you to believe that the film is autobiographical – although Reygadas won’t confirm or deny it. If that’s true however, that Our Time may just be three-hours of navel gazing – filmmaking as therapy – although to be fair here, if that’s the case, then Reygadas really doesn’t do much to make himself look good. He plays a petty asshole in the film – who says that he’s okay with his wife sleeping with other men, but does everything he can to undermine it – to control it – which pretty much dooms it from the start. And yet, we sit through three hours of this.

 

Asking if a film like Out Time works or not, I think misses the point. It isn’t a film that I would recommend to many people – Glenn Kenny has called it a “for cinephiles only” film – and that seems right. You likely wouldn’t want to make this your first Reygadas film – and there is a decent chance that even if you’ve liked some of his other films – Japon, Battle in Heaven, Silent Light, Post Tenebras Lux – that he’s going to test your patience with this film. Reygadas does interesting things throughout this film – finds interesting almost cinematic non-sequiturs at times, most notably when he takes us instead a car’s engines and wheels while a Genesis song plays. There’s also a strange trip to a concert, and another strange decision to have a very log, detailed letter that the wife writes to Juan, while the footage we see seems to be shot from underneath an airplane flying over Mexico City. As to why Reygadas does these things, who really knows – they do break up the film that it otherwise these people in rooms picking at each other, and having extended fights – so they can be welcome.

 

Because for the most part, Our Time does trap us with Juan and Esther – the husband and wife characters – as they bicker and argue. She’s younger than he is – the second wife that he left his first wife for. He is a celebrated poet, who occasionally travels and receives prizes for his work (seriously, Reygadas may have been better served to just make his character a filmmaker) – while she stays behind and runs their vast ranch. The man she starts the affair with is Phil (Phil Burgers) – an American who specializes in breaking horses. It appears that even before the film opens, this concept of an open relationship has been agreed to – logically, it makes sense of Juan – and Esther is certainly articulate at explaining why she is interested – to have something apart from him – as she feels she has done everything for him for the last 15 years. That’s theory though – in practice, the whole thing turns Juan into a jealous, manipulative asshole. He gets hung up early on a small lie Esther tells him about it that he uses to justify becoming that asshole. And then, he will covertly try and control the relationship by talking directly to Phil about it – without wanting Esther to know. He’ll spy on her – looking through her phone for example – and sometimes more directly – hiding in closets, peeping in windows, when she’s with either Phil – or another man he also put up to sleeping with his wife. As she keeps discovering these betrayals – the arguments keep happening – and get worse.

 

I think part of the point of the film is to trap you in hell with these characters – and in that, it succeeds perhaps too well. You will want out – you will want away from both of them. While Juan is more actively the asshole, I don’t think Esther helps very much – if you want an open relationship to work, you need to communicate with your partner – and both seem to be incapable of that. I cannot tell if Phil is supposed to be as dull as he is here, or whether that’s a byproduct of Reygadas’ insistence of working with non-professional actors (he and his wife are fine – not great, but fine) – because Phil is should be such a non-threat to Juan. He is, quite frankly, a dull idiot – perhaps Esther likes fucking him, but you cannot see her actually leaving Juan for him.

 

There are those who see Our Time and insist it is a masterpiece – a visionary film by a visionary director working on an entirely different level than most others. There will be those who are bored to tears by the film if they make it through it at all. To me, I’m somewhere in the middle – the be sure, the film is self-indulgent, and perhaps just navel gazing – something we take many filmmakers to task for when they are American. And yet, it did hold me in its spell – at least for most of its runtime (the film is too repetitive, and probably would have been a little better had it been a little shorter). But it is the type of film that only Reygadas could or would make. I’ll be ready for his next one in about 2023.