our time (d reygadas)

It feels as though half the city is participating in the Montevideo film festival with the cinemas constantly full. The slew of films permits one to take in a range of cinema you would never normally process in such a short period of time. An inevitable fatigue begins to set in. Many of the films are over two hours long. Almost all have something challenging about them. These aren’t popcorn movies. 

It requires something remarkable to stand out, to grab the viewer with a sense of astonishment and wonder. Our Time achieves this. The opening hour is as good as anything you could hope to see in a cinema. The camera roves around a country estate near Mexico City. There are four groups of people. Young children, adolescents, servants and adults. Each one is its own defined unit, but the edges wash and overlap. There’s a sense of inhabiting a moment, which is extraordinary. (It made me think, obliquely of Virgina Woolf and the almost cubist quality of her writing.) Gradually the threads of a narrative become discernible, but there is no rush: the primary objective is to immerse us completely in this world with all of its layers and subtleties. 

Then, the film becomes extraordinary for other reasons altogether. The narrative kicks in, a narrative which recounts the gradual decay of the protagonists’ marriage. This is told in raw, even embarrassing detail. The husband’s jealousy transformed into a grotesque voyeurism, as he becomes a Shakespearian cuckolded fool, wilfully participating in his own fall from grace. The twists and turns of the marital collapse are traced with an excessive, masochistic glee. It is as close to watching the reality of a break-up as one imagines cinema could get. A sloppy, ineditable narrative which barrels all over the shop, dragging on, remorseless, driven by a logic that seems greater than the will of the two protagonists. Which is very much a mirror to the messiness of a break-up in real life; because break-ups are never clean, they always involve pain and humiliation in one guise or another.

When one then realises that these protagonists are portrayed by none other than the filmmaker and his wife, Natalia López, it adds a jaw-dropping layer of complexity to the experience. What kind of crazy fool would dare to expose him or herself in this fashion? Or are they not really exposing themselves at all? Where does life and end art begin, or vice versa? Is this an act of courage or stupidity? Our Time is one of the most insane pieces of filmmaking ever made. It’s like Charlie Kaufmann stoked on cocaine and tequila. A rambling, chaotic brilliant dark night of a movie that is unlike anything else you will ever sit through.