effective film?

Ok, it is hard for me to put back my emotions about this film, as I experienced it as a ruthless torture for the spectator to sit through the entire film. However, I will try to be fair, even though I had to leave the cinema after 60 minutes.

The point of this film is quite clear. The chraracters and the environment are portrayed in a very effective way. The bleak lighting, the slow-paced editing and the static camera create an atmosphere of existential loss, senselesness, depression, rigidness and alientation, beatifully underlining the "storyline" of the main character and creating a strong empathy/sympathy with that world and its inhabitants. The carefully composed static camera shots and the lighting remind of Caravagio's paintings and convey a strange beauty from this bleak world. Also, I found it very interesting when the main character is outside, his dark features contrasting against the brightly-lit white buildings, evoking undertones of social and racial inequality. Interestingly, the sky in this day scenes was completely blacked-out, again, effectively underlining the emotional state of the character. So far, the style of the film (mise-en-scene and mise-en-shot) works very well. Now, the narrative is very loose and repetitve, which, again, effectively contributes to the overall mood of the film. However, I think the repetiveness is taken beyond limits. I don't mind repetition, as long as there is a point to it. Either, the repetition involves some minimal development or difference, or it lasts as long as to convey a point, but not to challenge the human attention span beyond measure. With this premisse, I think this film would have made an excellent and thought-provoking short film of 20 minutes, but the rest of the film was redundant. I have to admit I could not sit through the whole film, but I was told the way it ends, and I do not regret having left the theatre. I cannot understand why the film has been nominated in Cannes, unless it was a political decision. Maybe the jury felt it was time to have a Portuguese film in competition. In any case, I don't think the story offers any new insight. It has been told countless times before with better scripts and better actors. The only thing I found interesting was the style, but, as I mentioned, 20 minutes would have been more than enough to tell the story of this man.