The endless movie... The director managed to create a 2 1/2 hour movie that radiates the boredom of 6 months and feels like ten hours. The one good thing I can say is that it made me lose track of time completely. I almost expected to see daylight upon leaving the cinema. And it had started at 7pm...
It was not what I expected. But what did I expect? Maybe some work of art like Koyaanisqatsi, where one can lose himself in the rhythm and the pictures. But this movie here does have no rhythm. And for the content - I know not more or less than before, the life depicted in there coming very close to what I would have expected it to be, anyway. How do they live? I still don't know for sure, because the movie jumps wildly from scene to scene without enabling me to see a pattern. Yes, there is work and there is prayer and even a monk with an IBM Laptop doing the book-keeping (?), but I totally failed to get the big-picture. And that was, more or less, what I had expected when I bought the ticket.
And no, just because there are some blurred close-ups this movie is not necessarily a work of art.
But hey, the critics love it, so go see it and judge for yourself.