Suspended Time\u00a0(Hors du temps) is a 2024 film by veteran French writer-director Olivier Assayas, now available for streaming. It takes place during the height of the COVID lockdown in 2020. Two brothers and their girlfriends are confined to the brothers\u2019 family home in the charming countryside southwest of Paris.<\/p>\n
Suspended Time (2024)<\/p>\n
The fiction film has distinctly autobiographical features. The house is Assayas\u2019s father and mother\u2019s house. The books, the furniture, the pictures on the wall and so forth are his family\u2019s. Assayas is the narrator of the film as well. The filmmaker and his brother were quarantined together in 2020.<\/p>\n
But the brothers in the film are characters played by actors\u2014Paul Berger (Vincent Macaigne), a stand-in for the director, and Etienne Berger (Misha Lescot). Their partners are Morgane (Nine d\u2019Urso) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi), respectively. Paul also has an ex-wife Flavia (Maud Wyler), with whom he shares custody of a charming, talkative, slightly manipulative daughter Britt (Magdalena Lafont).<\/p>\n
Suspended Time\u00a0begins ominously enough. At first, it seems to suggest that, after all, the pandemic has a \u201csilver lining,\u201d at least for Paul. \u201cHere time had stopped.\u201d He has the opportunity to confront \u201ctoo many memories,\u201d a house \u201ctoo loaded, too dense\u201d with emotional baggage and work through his feelings about his father and grandfather, in particular. \u201cTime stood still,\u201d we are told again, as the camera examines the volumes, bound in different colors according to subject matter, in the father\u2019s library. Paul enjoys the hours spent in isolation and in nature.<\/p>\n
According to one admiring critic, \u201cIt\u2019s a film about a \u2018miraculous time-out\u2019 that coincided with COVID, which, despite some people\u2019s unraveling from the experience, allowed others to take stock of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
France experienced one of the highest total number of COVID cases in the world, more than 40 million (third after the US and India) and some 168,000 deaths (tenth-highest globally). Behind these statistics lies immense suffering, first of all, physical but also psychological and economic. If\u00a0Suspended Time\u00a0did nothing other than suggest that the pandemic was useful as a \u201ctime-out\u201d and the opportunity \u201cto take stock\u201d for the complacent upper middle class, one could only regard it with disdain.<\/p>\n
Indeed, early on, one wonders to oneself in the face of the idyllic images of a well-appointed house and lush grounds during a horrifying pandemic: truly, is there a social layer anywhere more conservative, national-parochial than this self-satisfied, superficially and eclectically cultured French petty bourgeoisie, which must have the right colored book covers, the proper wine for the region, season and time of day, the most fashionable clothing, etc., but has important thoughts and feelings about almost nothing?<\/p>\n
The film improves, however, or at least in sections. Paul does acknowledge the wider suffering and pays tribute to workers taking \u201cthe biggest risks.\u201d He also admits that current world realities are painful for many people. \u201cRight now, nothing gives me hope,\u201d he blurts out. The earnest, slightly fumbling Macaigne is a likeable performer, a little bit like someone out of a better Woody Allen film. He speaks to his therapist on a video call, with his cellphone or iPad leaning against the trunk of a large tree. At the end of the session, referring to their next online time together, he jokes: \u201cSame time, same tree.\u201d He and the equally down-to-earth d\u2019Urso bring something human and sincere to the work, which definitely needs that element.<\/p>\n
The brothers bicker over COVID regulations. Paul follows them rigorously, leaving packages outside for hours, regularly wearing gloves and stripping off and laundering his clothes after every excursion outside the home. Etienne, a music journalist, pays tribute to musicians who have died in the pandemic, including John Prine, but is the more selfish of the pair.<\/p>\n
The most revealing sequence, whether the filmmaker realizes it or not, occurs during one of the siblings\u2019 numerous spats. As noted, Paul is meticulous about hygiene and health, while Etienne spends much of his time making crepes and grousing about the quarantine. Finally, the latter boils over, denouncing the lockdown as an intolerable, unbearable attack on his \u201cfreedom.\u201d Here one sees dramatized the social and psychological link between the 60s\u2019 bohemian anarchistic type and the far-right \u201canti-vaxxer.\u201d It is a valuable, telling moment.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, however, to repeat,\u00a0Suspended Time\u00a0alternates between middle class obliviousness and awareness of graver, widespread difficulties. Despite the anxieties, Paul muses, \u201cI liked the confinement.\u201d And \u201cIt felt like a utopia, and that utopia has to end.\u201d But later, \u201cStillness is not a utopia. Stillness is nothingness. \u2026 I am terrified of living in a pandemic world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paul muses about the need for a new kind of cinema under these conditions, but what kind of cinema? Assayas\u2019s history does not suggest that he has the most profound answer to that question.<\/p>\n
The writer-director came to international prominence in the 1990s with a series of films, including\u00a0Cold Water\u00a0(1994),\u00a0Irma Vepp\u00a0(1996) and\u00a0Late August, Early September\u00a0(1998). In a generally bleak time for French and world cinema, Assayas\u2019s intelligent but chilly films were greeted with praise by certain critics.<\/p>\n
Suspended Time<\/p>\n
On the other hand, we\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0in 1999, that what distinguished Assayas\u2019s films was<\/p>\n their almost complete lack of spontaneity. Assayas \u2026 knows what a good film looks like. Instead of making a work that really means something to him, unfortunately, he seems to want to be thought highly of. His films, where everything is arranged for effect, sink under the weight of their self-consciousness.<\/p>\n