I watched this at the independent cinema on the 18th of June, 2024. It was a brilliant film, impeccably cast, shot and edited, and a little confusing, but all the better for it.
Lea Seydoux has an unbelievable presence and is such a brilliant actor, as is her male love interest in the three different lives shown in the film. The overall themes, of anxiety and fear preventing close emotional contact and love (I think) were explored in a very subtle way, from the repression in 1910s Paris adding to the flame, to the shyness being warped and distorted by online culture into inceldom in the 2014 arc, to emotionality being a negative for job prospects in the 2054 arc.
It had similar elements to Cloud Atlas, or Station Eleven, of patterns and recurrences through time, from the pigeon, to the motif of floating dead in water, to the fortune teller, to the dancing together, and the neutral doll’s face.
Some scenes were genuinely unsettling and scary, with the 2014 bit in particular, with her murder at the hands of the incel being a terrifying watch.
It was also very self-referential at parts - at the start, the film shows Lea (as her 2014 character) on a green stage, told that she is scared of something, and that she sees it and screams. The acting, music, and cinematography pull together in the next sequence so brilliantly that it is genuinely scary despite the only thing on screen being Lea and a sea of green.
I’m not describing it very well, and I think other places will do it better.
Some scenes I liked: