On Saturday and Wednesday the Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting a new restoration of Time to Die, a 1965 Mexican western scripted by not one, but two celebrated novelists, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Both men enjoyed long side careers in cinema (they also collaborated on at least one other project, a 1964 feature called The Golden Cockerel), but unfortunately few of the movies they wrote are available on DVD in this country. This revival provides an exciting introduction to bodies of work that have been unknown objects to U.S. audiences. That Time to Die is also brilliantly directed—and by a 22-year-old neophyte no less—is icing on the cake.
A morbid air infuses Time to Die (the title almost promises as much), as the threat of a fatal gunfight simmers beneath much of the plot. Interlaced with the suspense are scenes that consider the passage of time and the death that inevitably awaits everyone. In one of the movie’s first scenes Sayago goes to collect his saddle from the rancher friend who held onto it after he was sentenced to prison. He learns that the man is long dead, but his son, now running the ranch, agrees to help out Sayago out of respect for his father’s memory. And when Sayago asks his bartender friend about his former fiancee, he learns that she has been married and widowed during the course of his sentence. The woman, Mariana (Marga López), reenters into a relationship with Sayago, but more out of loneliness than attraction to him. It’s as though everyone wants to find a sense of peace before it’s too late.
