Our Time (Carlos Reygadas, 2018) (Patreon)

How to we distinguish between between art and real life? The Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky argued that art was a process of estrangement, putting us at a distance from the familiar so that, in a dialectical reversal, it would come closer to us again, less habituated in our perception and instead renewed, so that it may shine forth. (His often cited dictum is that art "makes the stone stony.") By contrast, Derrida, following from Heidegger, argued that it was enframing that set artistic visions apart from the rest of everyday life. Unlike Heidegger, however, Derrida claims in The Truth in Painting that the frame is notoriously permeable, and even reversible. It's an unstable boundary that, like a border wall, exteriorizes the inside,making manifest the rules that govern the boundary itself.

I begin with this set of considerations because for quite some time, there has been no question whatsoever that Carlos Reygadas was producing art. Some might even say that he was clobbering us over the head with the obtrusive artisticness of his art, so clearly indebted has be been to Andrei Tarkovsky who, in contemporary cinematic language, has become a kind of shorthand for mystical seeing. In films like Japón, Battle in Heaven, Silent Light, and Post Tenebras Lux, Reygadas has risked pretension and possibly ridicule in order to bring to the faithful a brand of fully sincere, capital-A Art. A helicopter shot circles a dying horse. A young girl and a middle-aged man engage in explicit sex. A repentant man rips off his own head. These are images that stop narrative in its tracks, that cry out for comparison to Goya and Caravaggio. They depart from the status of the quotidian, arresting time itself.

Now we come to a new juncture in Reygadas's career, one for which no one was prepared. In the past, the question was, is this good or bad art? But with Our Time, the question is actually being raised. Is this a real film? Is this a work if art, or a therapy session? How are we supposed to watch something so uncomfortably close to reality? What is gained by this intensive fidelity to actual traumatic events? And how can an artist who has so far traded so insistently on the metaphorical and the mysterious have gone down such a straightforward, literal path? 

Rumored to be based on actual events in the director's personal life, Our Time is a three-hour excavation of a relationship in free fall, starring Reygadas himself as Juan, the husband, and Reygadas's wife Natalia López as his wife Ester. They are ranchers who raise bulls for bullfights, and due to the close observation of this family business and the various bulls, cows, and vaqueros on the land, we are nearly one hour into the film before we discover that the couple is not only extremely cultured, but that Juan is also a world-famous poet.

The couple have three kids, and for years have had an open relationship, although based on what we see, this arrangement seems to be more about Ester taking lovers, and telling Juan the details -- a cuckold sex-play scenario -- than a true egalitarianism. When it appears that Ester develops feelings for one of Juan's friends, a horse breaker named Phil (Phil Burgers), it brings long-simmering jealousies and resentments to the surface. 

As Blake Williams has written in Cinema Scope, Reygadas is at his best when he is dealing with exteriors and landscapes, in particular the formless aspects of space that cannot be subordinated to purely narrative functions. The cosmological opening of Silent Light is probably the best example of this, and in Our Time, the opening 15 or so minutes of kids playing in the mud serves a similar (non) function. There are at least two aspects of Our Time that are repelling certain Reygadas fans, and as Williams also notes, they are intertwined. One is that this is a film of oversharing, a work that pulls us far closer into the filmmaker's troubled world than we care to be pulled. The other is, Our Time is Reygadas's most straightforward, linear film -- the story of a love triangle, albeit an excruciatingly frank example of the form.

Up to know, Reygadas has channeled his vision not only through actors, but through surrealist symbology and an almost mystical engagement with the landscape, and to a large extent, Our Time puts those techniques aside. He plays "himself," minimizes the surface affectations, and subdues the land through the narrative pretext of the ranch. In fact, Reygadas frequently makes it a point to show lens flares and magic hour light peering through, almost incidentally, during otherwise ordinary activities. Beauty is merely fleeting in this troubled world.

The real heart of the film consists of underlit interiors and soul-baring arguments, letters, and especially text messages and emails, as if to force the issue that we are deep in the workaday world and outside of any cosmic time. And yet, somehow, the characters must find ways to transmit massive emotion through these ordinary means. They seldom lapse into melodrama. Instead, they squeeze their feelings into the small daily space available.

I began with a question of whether Our Time is a work of art. That is, is it too close to its maker, reflecting insufficient distance, to communicate aesthetically, to as it were, make it's stones stony? This, I'd argue, is precisely the problem the film addresses. A world-renown poet struggles not only to find the words with which to express his needs to his wife, but to even make a space in their world for (as he himself puts it) Ester's "becoming." How do you maintain the high ideals of the examined life in the face of crushing habit, especially when even your manner of avoiding bourgeois morality has itself calcified into habit? 

There is, of course, one dominant symbol in Our Time, and in keeping with the crises reflected in the film, it is suitably clunky and artless. The literal raging bull, who slaughters the mule and threatens the vaqueros, is unbridled testosterone, pure male id. This is what Juan is trying in vain to suppress with culture and manners, or, it is what he has already lost. Reygadas is a brave artist, showing himself to be a real bastard a lot of the time, and part of that is the fact that toxic masculinity does not require horns to destroy what it loves. At one point, Juan's daughter (Eleazar Reygadas) tells her adoring daddy that he smells like "kaka." Despite what its detractors may think, Our Time is not a bullshit film; it's a film about being covered in bullshit, and the struggle to get clean.