gorgeous cinematography in this. the consistent visual trademark between this and On the Beach is the great skill in framing. the editing is a lot faster in this one, of course, but there aren’t really any inserts. just a master shot very carefully chosen so that the action of the scene can play out with some dynamism.
the copy i watched didn’t have translations of the intertitles, so i was on high alert trying to figure out WTF was happening when scenes started repeating. my interpretation was that the events were being shown from different perspectives, obviously; but i had no confidence that any of them was more true than the other. when i looked up some reviews to try to see what i missed, some reviews seemed to unequivocally present the “her perspective” scenes as authoritative. but the small details, dropping a spoon versus a fork, were intended to make her narrative position unreliable.
when i watched On the Beach, i thought i saw something transcendent. something that is not normal in movies. in this one, i thought i saw a glimmer of the same thing in some of the scenes that show him taking the metro out to the middle of nowhere. some kind of next-level realism.