By the technology used in the house, and in the van they use to escape, we can see that they are in the 2010's because when they are inside the car, at first, they don't know how to start the engine because it was a button they had to press so they could start moving the car.
This scene is filmed and based in England, 2012, in a nursing home where apparently wealthy people can afford it. The elderly's costumes are quite out of style because they are probably wearing the same clothes of thirty forty years ago. They, as characters, seem quite sad and depressed for being in that nursing home when some of them aren't even sick or mentally ill. And we can see that with the colours they wear in their costumes, the colours the edition uses in the scene and the colour of the nursing home: white and grey.
We can also observe that the length of the shots are very short, they can vary a little, but they're almost the same length. This is to create more drama and see every thing they're doing in detail so we don't miss anything.
Leading up to the climax in this scene, there is the elderly in the van trying to figure out how to start the car engine, when they finally achieve that, they see that another member of the team wants to escape as well, so they have to come back for him.
The climax is about them going back to the nursing home entrance to pick him up, and when the team member is on the van, they have to escape again from the owners of the van they stole from and from the nurse. Then, the former tells the janitor to close the gates and the elderly have to accelerate the van, otherwise they wouldn't be able to get out of the nursing home. They try to escape.
Afterwards, they exhale victoriously celebrating they could get out and they keep on driving as far as they can.
The music in this scene is perfectly well combined with three different melodies:
The first one is the tension of figuring out how to start the engine.
Once they figured that out, the music stops and the radio of the van plays the music that was playing before the owners turned off the engine.
And the third one is about picking up Mr. Meeks (the other team member) from the entrance and getting out of there. When they brake the gates with the van there is a very delightful tone of victory helping us understand that they escaped the way they wanted to.
There are no transitions in this scene, the shots are short and neither the shots nor the scene have transitions. This is to create mor tension and interest in the scene, and of course, the movie in general.
In summary, Cloud Atlas is in constant cross-cut so we can get more involved in the stories and understand better the movie with all the details we need to catch. This cross-cutting is good for us, because if each story was shown individually, they wouldn't make the sense it makes with the cross-cuts, and the reason why we need those cross-cuts is to keep it interesting and catch every detail shown in each scene and shot so it could make sense to the next scene of the next story.
This is a good summary of the mise-en-scene and editing used in this sequence. Your analysis of the costumes and obvious wealth of the people who put their parents in these homes is very accurate I think. The breakdown of the editing here is also very well written. In reference to the cross-cutting, you could perhaps have given an example, such as the way this story has a strong impact on the Sonmi 451 story.
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