For Éternité, Tran Anh Hung took a rather unusual approach, but I don’t think it worked for me. It drove me crazy that there was way more narration than actual dialogue in the film. It was pretty much 95% narration and 5% dialogue. It was to the point that Éternité didn’t feel like a feature film, but rather a documentary retelling major events of a story, accompanied by some pretty visuals. The thing is, the major events it told were dull. There were almost only two kinds of event in the film: birth and death. Each event got about 4-7 minutes of screentime. After the first 45 minutes, things started to feel repetitive, and I found myself starting to think: "She’s pregnant, AGAIN? Who will be the next one to get knocked up, AGAIN? Who will be the next one to die?". There was no element of surprise. Even the "twist" felt forced and predictable. It was just so hard to feel for something that happened over and over and over.
Well, it was pretty though, I'll give it that. But that's it.