very beautiful and masterfully constructed—excellent mise-en-scene; lots of details and a very beautiful co-ordination of colours that still realistically evokes a world. recognizable to me in its distinctly slow cinematic aesthetics, but this film still had a few tricks that quite surprised me. the use of a tracking shot around 40 minutes was shocking, a disruption both of the vocabulary this work establishes, and the vocabulary of the genre. there was at least one other moment where the film added an element to its repertoire that I found quite surprising: first, we have a lingering shot of one of the characters standing next to some massive stone wall, and we hear what sounds like a bus stop announcement. ok, classic,using sound to tell us about the world beyond the world of the characters that our view is confined to. but I didn’t expect the perspective shift of a pan that shows the buildings around the main compound they live in.
the film is gorgeous. the way the costumes and colours and set design evolve as the world they inhabit changes. and especially the architecture they inhabit: it’s monumental, and make this film very gorgeous to look at. I found it very difficult to follow the narrative and keep track of the characters, and for that reason I don’t have. strong sense of what this film was about or what it’s thematic concerns are, beyond a very general “it’s about change, etc.” despite having such a strong craft, despite even having certain aesthetic touches that really set this guy’s direction apart from other slow xinema guys, this still feels like a “slow cinema genre film.”