A dreary soap opera dressed up with arty cinematography that is often superficially bold and self-conscious, Our Time is an endurance test at three hours. Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas ("Silent Light") turns a simple story of marital breakdown into a baffling labyrinth of peripheral details and characters. Those extraneous elements (ranching activity; a long opening scene of children playing in a muddy pond) largely give the filmmaker an excuse to thrust his camera in the middle of action scenes (there is a shocking moment when a bull attacks a wooden wagon carrying cinematographer Diego Garcia) but are otherwise meaningless. Reygadas himself plays Juan, a rancher and world-famous poet who enjoys an open relationship with his wife, Esther (Natalia Lopez, Reygadas' real-life spouse).
When Esther has a brief affair with an American visitor, Juan is offended by her secretiveness and dishonesty about it--- the first breach of their arrangement. Juan loses his customary optimism and sense of control, and becomes a hectoring jerk, driving Esther mad and making it harder for her to process what has happened. It's not a surprise that she feels overwhelmed by her life as a rancher, wife, and mother, with little that underscores her sense of self. It's also not a revelation that this narrative is ordinary and earthbound, a strange contrast to Reygadas' flights of stunningly lyrical visuals that, if the beautiful, amount to empty gestures. Not recommended.