"Our Time" (Nuestro tiempo): directed by Carlos Reygadas and his wife play a married couple in a movie about sex and treason

The film “Our Time” by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, winner of the prize for the best direction in Cannes (for the film “Light After Darkness”). The tape tells about an attempt of a married couple to leave from life in the capital on a solitary ranch - and about the impossibility to escape from their own reflection. I will try to explain why the director gave the main roles not to professional actors, but to himself and his wife Natalia López - and how, thanks to this, he managed to achieve closer contact with the audience.

This film will not be shown in multiplexes. He will go and not in all art-house cinemas, and when he gets there, the rental will be limited. Three-hour Mexican painting with a hard rating of 18+? No thanks. However, it is unlikely that even those who are categorically close to the work of Carlos Reygadas will refuse to admit, after seeing his fifth film, "Our Time", that such directors are the salt of cinema. They have always been few. They are unfamiliar compromises, no calculation. For them, cinema is an ongoing, sometimes painful and always fascinating search. Watching their films is also a job, sometimes quite hard, but always interesting.

The name "Our Time" is deceptively simple. In fact, at first it is impossible to understand when the action of the picture unfolds. Her heroes, one Juan and his wife Ester, live on their ranch in the desert countryside, not far from the muddy shallow lake and the picturesque mountains in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala. The time they have their flows in its own way: they did everything possible not to depend on the changing world. They raise children - two small children go to school every day, the eldest is studying at the institute - and they are raising bulls for bullfighting. Sometimes one of them goes to Mexico City, you can turn around one day. Usually this “someone” Ester. She cheats on her husband with lovers, and her husband knows about it.

Adultery is the plot of the film and its central theme, even though he approaches it terribly long; only children who frolic in the mud on the shore of the reservoir occupy the first twenty minutes. The life of the characters looks like an idyll, and it is impossible to believe that they are unhappy or not satisfied. They obviously love each other (otherwise they do not refer to “amore”), they have a full-fledged sex life and mutual understanding. Only gradually, noticing the anxiety on the face and in Juan's intonations, you begin to understand that something is wrong.

Harmony carefully designed. The husband loves his wife so much and is so afraid of losing her that he decided to make their marriage free. She can sleep when and with whom she wishes, only not to make a secret out of it. How long they managed to live on such conditions is unclear: “our time” is always present, the couple’s past is foggy. Now the crisis has come. Juan is no longer able to restrain possessive instincts - resentment and jealousy. Esther cannot tell her husband about all the details of her intimate life: it is not a matter of fear of punishment, but of wanting personal space. When Ester converges with a cute gringo named Phil, for the first time on the horizon there is a threat of divorce.

Adyulter is an old-world-like motif that sounds in all of world literature, from the Iliad to Anna Karenina. Reygadas approaches him from a non-standard side: he explores the dangers of excessive freedom, and not the restrictions that the marriage imposes on spouses. A person is able to control his body - or rid him of excessive control, given free rein to desires - but cannot subdue his phobias, obsessions, hopes. “Our Time” is about that. Free flight of the camera across the endless expanses of Mexico, animals rushing on the prairie: horses, dogs, aggressive and beautiful bulls, children splashing in the water - should, in theory, emphasize the anarchic happiness of merging with nature, which Juan and Ester provided for themselves. In fact, each of these signs indicates the impossibility of inner freedom in matters of sex and possession. If you are not a beast, but a person, happiness for you is only a concept and never a reality.

Many are puzzled over the strange decision of Reygadas to play himself in the role of Juan and invite his wife to the role of Ester, including very frank erotic scenes, the editor of his films Natalia López. Can't the reason be only in typical similarity with the characters from the script (and in the exceptional beauty of López)? This is not the first time that the director, not being an actor, takes on the main role in his own film: you can recall the film “Iklimler” by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the film “Aurora” by Cristi Puiu. There is always more to this decision than a technical necessity.

The answer seems to be simple. Juan and Ester must be the ones who Reygadas and López really are - two intellectuals who have decided to “simplify” but are unable to turn off reflection and abandon cultural baggage, the inevitable curse of any thinking person. When Juan and I get into the living room of his house on the ranch, we see: it is filled with shelves of books. By profession, he is, as it turns out, a world famous poet. Ester is a teacher of English literature, traveling to the capital for a symphony concert of avant-garde music, where the conductor thanks her from the stage. These details give the epic "Our Time" a taste of a sad comedy about the burden of education and culture, which excludes the possibility of freedom itself - sexual and any other. No matter how smart you are in the saddle, no matter how brave you can tame the bulls.