The first minute of this film is better than entire acclaimed English-speaking movies of the year I'm watching it; 2020. But the film is ultimately disappointing.
Every movie director can take nice pictures, but this is a film of not only stunning visuals but stunning visuals time and again imbued with meaning in relation to society and environment.
The film is actually several separate short stories. Short stories can be perfect ideas uncorrupted by the extrapolation necessary for full-length films. But these short films reveal the weakness in lack of depth usually associated with the short film form: the limited time in which, with depth, to tell a tale.
Each of the main characters are victims of their situation, exploited by others in positions of authority in a society built this way. The users are not seen as such by the general mass of the people, who the director shows as dumb animals, most clearly in a scene with a mistreated animal in relation to the scene that it follows.
Though the short films are fleshed-out snapshots, they are snapshots all the same, wasting the promise of meaning imbued in single images. But the great failing is the lack of resolution to each story. A fatuous comeuppance is stuck on almost all as the director takes the easy way out.
These dim-witted "resolutions" are as if these days to end a film this way is more than acceptable, it is acclaimed. It is too easy to simply give up and do a Tarantino. The stories haven't quite lived up to their potential and then are given up on.
Still, despite its flaws, what is good about the film shows a great filmmaker at work.
