Vu en salle, festival Télérama, présenté par un étudiant.
A good short story artificially inflated, in a way the director clearly did on purpose ("I am not able to make films shorter even if I would like to.", sure). Stretched out as much as possible by inserting foreign narratives (the car/driver stuff, the contemporary art theatre stuff) that barely get to tie in with a final random parallel despite sharing language as a tenuous link.
The added bits, as nice as some are, don't do anything for the main dish. And the main thing even ends quite a bit before the end (the ludicrous "reveal" of the driver). That "pre-ending conclusion" is probably the highlight of its story and the whole package.
Even though I have seen this story itself, isolated from the alien ingredients, a thousand times before (told in variously interesting ways), the whole film is nicely "flatly" shot and helped to pass time.
(I was personally annoyed very early in, thanks to the typical "asian author cine-sex" repeated in the overlong prologue.)
Score: 4/10
Enjoyment: 3/5
More than two hours during wich I was only wishing to be watching that multilingual Waiting for Godot.
Rant:
It's made so large by all those things that seem added more than integrated, that I'm sure many people can project whatever they want to. I guess it's a success if that was the intention.
People usually like parts of this kind of films enough to forgive the fluff. Or they like what they believe they are seeing in the fluff. Vacuum movies have that power.