I took a chance on Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux mainly on the basis of the intriguing image of a red demon with horns moving through a living room. In the end, that was one surreal image included in a visually immersive arthouse drama about an upper class family and their workers in Mexico. I thought it was really great and several moments still linger in my memory (a child alone in a muddy paddock with animals, an English schoolboy rugby scrummage, an Eyes Wide Shut style orgy of adults). I was curious about Reygadas’ follow up, Our Time (2018; Nuestro tiempo), and it long beckoned intimidatingly with its three hour length. I felt that it literalised a lot of what Post Tenebras Lux left unsaid and abstract, and the story is more of a direct portrait of a marriage under duress between poet-rancher Juan (played by Reygadas himself) and his wife Esther (Natalia Lopez, Reygadas’s wife). The characters have an open marriage, but a serious schism occurs when Esther falls in love with an American hired hand, Phil (Phil Stevens). It’s hard not to read into everything once you know it is Reygadas and his wife playing these roles, their children also playing themselves. Reygadas in interviews has strongly denied there’s any autobiographical or therapeutic work going on here. Yet it all feels loaded particularly when Reygadas’ character, Juan, almost finds perverse pleasure and suffering in being the cuckold while Reygadas the director is filming his wife in very intimate scenes with other men. Hence, some critics have labelled it self-indulgent (you might too). I don’t know if I felt too much for either character, and sometimes wondered if professional actors in the lead three roles would have been better (Lopez is the strongest performance). But I appreciated that as the film kept going, moving on from Juan’s masculine perspective and finding complexity in the difficulties the characters are trying to work out openly with each other. Helping this are startling visuals and sequences filmed by Adrian Durazo and Diego Garcia – from the vistas of the ranch where Juan and Esther raise bulls, the changing weather patterns of Mexico, a sequence that explores how the motor of Esther’s car works, a lengthy shot of Mexico City from above while Esther reads a letter that examines their marriage eloquently, to the final poetic moment scored to King Crimson’s ‘Islands’. In the end, I was glad that I watched it, and how it took its time to reconcile the emotional and sexual actions of its characters, and also depicted small moments (receiving a text in an opera, ignoring texts while driving) as epic cinematic offerings. Available to stream on Stan and Kanopy. Recommended.
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