In a classic case of having one’s cake and eating it – never understood that expression; what else would you do with a cake? – the ending of Our Times is both romantically fulfilling and thematically daring. Or, more accurately, it wants to be both of those things. It ends up being neither. Let me explain.
Netflix’s Mexican rom-com, which doubles as a kind of feminism starter pack for people who have woken up in contemporary society with no idea of how things work, hinges on the premise of a married couple building a time machine in 1966 that accidentally transplants them into 2025. Needless to say, society and its gender dynamics are very different, and while the wife, Nora, finds herself enamoured with the upsides, her husband, Hector, suddenly realizes he’s a social dinosaur and becomes a men’s rights activist virtually overnight.
I won’t recount the entire thing, obviously, but imagine a lot of childlike wonder at how subways work, prescient social commentary about how our devices are being used to hypnotize us, and then the creeping realization that all these changes have resulted in a world that is significantly more amenable to women and is thus objectively better – which is great for Nora, but significantly less so for Hector. Now, onto the juicy stuff.
The Turning Point
In simple terms, Nora and Hector are trapped in 2025 until they can repair their time machine. The only way to do this is by sneaking into the university where they built it, which is conveniently where they meet Julia, one of Nora’s former students who is now the dean of the university and is happy to throw its full financial and logistical weight behind the project of rebuilding the machine. This is highly convenient, and it’s quite remarkable how many people just blithely accept the reality of time travel, but it’s also necessary to get the plot moving, so it didn’t annoy me very much.
It’s during this process that Nora and Hector begin to get used to contemporary society. Through Alondra, the granddaughter of Nora’s dead sister – another convenient element that we won’t focus too much on – Nora learns that women in 2025 have it pretty good compared to the swinging sixties. They don’t have to travel with chaperones, sexism isn’t quite as rampant, and women even have sex out of wedlock now. Nora isn’t totally onboard with the idea of marriage no longer being the hypothetical romantic ideal, since she continues to take her vows to Hector seriously, but she does begin to take to some of the more contemporary ideas, especially the sexy ones. Hector, however, does not.
Wound up by Nora apparently stealing his limelight in the time machine project and beginning to feel like her “assistant” despite his superior scientific contributions – the irony, of course, is that Hector is fulfilling the role that Nora did in the sixties without any complaint whatsoever – Hector becomes increasingly frustrated and combative, which culminates in him making a fool of himself by trying to hijack a presentation Nora is giving and dismissively giving an eye-rolling, “Women, am I right?” to the horrified crowd. To make matters worse, he’s then seduced – not like that – by a group of dorky MRA types who film him drunkenly ranting about the need to bring back 60s values. Yikes.
Sulking Across the Ages
Lucero and Benny Ibarra in Our Times (2025) | Image via Netflix
Remember, the entire point of the present-day time-travel project is for Nora and Hector to return home, and when they make enough progress, Hector feels like it’s time to do so. At no point has he ever really considered that Nora would be compelled to stay, so he’s shocked when she doesn’t just skip back to the sixties and resume being a second-class citizen.
Curiously, Our Times ignores a lot of the genuinely compelling reasons Nora has to leave and instead reduces everything down to her making a stand against her husband – and, by extension, in support of feminism – so Hector’s departure, alone, plays like a tantrum. Nora’s sister had died in a car accident during her frantic search for Nora following Hector’s and her disappearance, and Nora has a lot of guilt over this, believing it wouldn’t have happened if they had never left. However, she’s dramatically absolved by her sister Rebeca’s grown-up daughter, Rebequita, and there are also genuine concerns that returning to the 60s now could cause irreparable damage to their reality.
I guess not, since Hector goes back and nothing changes, but whatever. Who cares about the details? Besides, this isn’t that kind of time travel movie. It’s this kind…
This Isn’t Romantic!
Despite having clearly returned to the sixties in a huff, Hector leaves behind an uncharacteristically understanding note that explains he left for Nora’s benefit. He had apparently realized that she was destined for great things and that his outdated views and inability to change were going to hold her back. Since he loves her so much, he couldn’t do that to her and instead decided to live his entire life alone and leave her behind.
This is where things get silly. With the time travel wormhole closed for another 30 years, Nora basically lives out her dream professional life, becomes a highly revered woman of science, and then ultimately builds another time machine on her own. So, I guess she didn’t need Hector at all, only really proving his point that he was kind of functioning as her assistant. But that isn’t the silly bit, it’s just the setup for it.
Our Times ends with a hilariously aged Hector bumping into a thirty-years-older Nora. She has come back to be with him after a lifetime of flourishing professionally on her own. And Hector can’t believe his luck. I, on the other hand, was a bit more sceptical. Is this really that romantic? It isn’t like they’re going to get their best years together – they’re both nearly dead. Is romance truly living a completely separate life from your spouse and flourishing professionally while he becomes a wizened old loner without any companionship?
More to the point, this turn also annoyingly raises a bunch of logical questions, like whether Nora’s sister was alive in this timeline, whether Hector was able to build his own time machine, and how any of these things affected the other timeline that Nora remained in. Admittedly, these questions were never really the point of Our Times, but in a misguided effort to provide a quintessentially happy ending, it couldn’t help but make them problems.
