Carlos Reygadas and Natalia López in Our Time (Monument Releasing)

The beginning of the new film by acclaimed Mexican director Carlos Reygadas reminds you of his intense and poetic sensibility. Over the course of the first 10 to 15 minutes, the camera makes you feel like an intruder spying a glimpse of a muddy Eden while a group of children and teenagers play innocent (and not so innocent) games on a lakeshore. The children plan silly pranks while the teenagers flirt, moved by their hormones.

Helped by Diego García’s bucolic cinematography, this introduction doesn’t bother you with plot intricacies but instead offers a pleasant contemplation of carefree innocence barely finding forbidden fruit. This approach will not last long. It’s like a sweet appetizer before the focus on more complicated lives.

What comes next is an exhausting story that draws a dividing line between the lost paradise incidentally introduced and the purgatory of mature relationships. Though García’s lenses retain an ethereal mood and Reygadas’s narrative pulse never diminishes in its intent, the rest of the film dispels the charm from the first impression and replaces it with more conventional storytelling. Funnily, in the case of Reygadas, that is not the kind of adjective that usually defines his work (semi-abstract and allegorical films like Japón, Silent Light, or Post Tenebras Lux). In that regard, the film is an atypical surprise with mixed results.

In what can be interpreted as an artistic gesture of authentic sublimation or pathetic self-indulgence, Reygadas casts himself and his wife, Natalia López, as a couple, Juan and Esther, at the dawning of a severe matrimonial crisis. They raise a family that includes one teenager son and a younger daughter (and as you guessed, played by the real-life son and daughter of Reygadas and López). Both live and work in a ranch dedicated to breeding bulls, though Juan is also a poet. In the context of a chauvinist and conservative society like Mexico, this marriage is different from others because of to an agreement: they are in an open relationship that allows them to have sex with others as long as they are honest with each other about what they do (and how they do it).

It’s never clear for how long they have had this arrangement and how many people have been involved with them, but now something different has happened. It seems that Esther has a strong advantage with this “contract” because she is having an actual affair with Phil (Phil Burgers), an American cowboy who maintains a friendship and business relationship with Juan. This is not just a temporary sex adventure, at least not in the eyes of a jealous Juan, who’s starting to notice that his wife looks affected and doesn’t tell him everything unless he interrogates her intensively.

Our Time tackles a contemporary subject on romantic relationships with a certain intelligence, but sometimes it turns toward the unsubtle melodrama tradition associated with Latin American telenovelas. The solemnity centered on this pedestrian conflict would be easy to dismiss entirely if it weren’t for some great scenes: a bull horning a horse and an extensive aerial shot of Mexico City at twilight. The fights between Juan and Esther are predictable, and you couldn’t care less for the resolution when you don’t feel sympathy or sorrow for the couple.

Reygadas wants you to understand how hurt Juan feels for a situation that he has encouraged while proving to himself that nothing can break his control over Esther. There is nothing exactly new or fresh in this approach. He’s just another jealous man pretending to be open-minded but terrified of a woman falling in love with another man and being replaced. The problem is that Reygadas, as director, puts more weight in the character he embodies and considers Juan’s feelings more important than Esther’s. She remain elusive and ambiguous as a satellite swirling around her husband. Vanitas vanitatum.

Probably Our Time will usually be ranked as the weakest Reygadas movie. Still you can appreciate how he uses a traditional tale of jealousy to subvert some masculinity tropes that are the spinal cord of misogyny in Latin America: Juan is a rancher who cries and expresses his feelings openly. If only Esther were more than a plot device to catalyze those repressed masculine emotions. Additionally, the story can’t sustain its three-hour length, and you will prefer to get lost in the beautiful surface, which will never be as bright and enchanting as it is in the almost arbitrary introduction.