Critics reviews

Our Time’s mix of sex and politics exposes what was always insufferable and elitist in the Reygadas temperament. Lacking Zeffirelli’s old-fashioned warmth, what devouts call charisma, Our Timeepitomizes our era’s spiritual vacancy.

It disavows many of the conventions of cinema, adopting an approach that mirrors non-fiction filmmaking to capture the beauty and intimacy of the daily life of the couple and their clan.

The concern I had after watching Our Time, though, wasn’t whether or not there were any such moments of metaphysical bliss; there are, and they are among the most glorious in Reygadas’ filmography to date. Rather, there’s an uneasiness in the film, and it stems from the follow-through—that return to innocence and purity that reinstates the divine.

Reygadas’ epic fifth feature film is more than an analysis or narration of a love triangle, it is a cinematographic and linguistic exploration of the intangible and ineffable.

In the wrong hands a topic such as this could quickly become banal; however, Reygadas deals with it in a daring and truthful way.

There is plenty of room to criticize it as an endurance test, but glossing over the wonders nestled inside it would be a myopic disservice.

I have a serious and admittedly unreasonable allergy to watching couples pursue the same repetitive-but-tonally-escalating fights over and over while both serially making the worst decisions possible, so when Time finally gets on with its plot I started getting irrationally annoyed.

What emerges from this cinematic experiment in auto-fiction is a soul-searching work of scorching honesty that functions both as an anatomy of love and marriage, and as an evisceration of masculinity.

It’s a movie I’m still processing. Maybe it’s best if I just describe how it made me feel. About an hour into it, I was blown away. I was thinking, “This is awesome. This is the ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ of adultery movies.” About two hours and twenty minutes in I was thinking “I’m in jail. I’m in jail with these people.”

A film of considerable visual poetry and, at times, grandeur, Our Time is unmistakably the work of the ambitious, visionary director behind Battle In Heaven and Stellet Licht, but as a Bergmanesque drama of emotional anguish, the solemn, militantly downbeat Our Time often makes oppressive viewing and at times struggles to justify its nearly three-hour length.