Consider this concept:
In this alternate reality, people stop aging when they're 25 but have a clock counting down embedded in their arm. When the clock reaches zero the person will die.
Goods and services can be traded using time. For example a coffee costs 4 minutes, a new car costs 2 years, a night at a top hotel costs 2 months.
The film interprets Marx' labour theory of value in this way, along with the class struggle.


The rich minority live for centuries or millennia without aging. The poor mostly live day-to-day (in the literal sense now) never having more than about 24 hours on their clocks. There's subtler things too. The rich don't run or hurry because they've got all the time in the world. The working classes run whenever they can.
The concept makes the inequality more obvious with time. Many of the rich have geological time in their bank accounts, we're left wondering why they need so much.

You can see the film is a product of its time. In other works the rich are usually large factory owners or landlords, in this film they are bankers and insurance brokers. The film deals with financial capital rather than industrial capital.


Two reviews I found related to it.
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011 ... f-of-time/
http://www.thenation.com/article/164463/times-squared