Let’s cut to the chase: Olivier Assayas’s slight autobiographical reverie on lockdown doesn’t work.
Solipsistic, repetitive and smothered in show-offy intellectualism, Suspended Time (an unfortunate title in English) is practically a parody of a post Eric Rohmer French drama, which is a painful thing to write given Assayas’ exceptional body of work. Can it really be a France vs. the rest of the world thing? Well-read Anglophones can just as easily discuss David Hockney, Pierre Bonnard, and Abelard and Héloïse as their French counterparts, but perhaps there’s something in our genes that feels there’s more than a bit of the poseur about a dinner companion who insists on tossing a high-brow salad to serve beyond their intimate circle. Most critics will not be kind, and the film has very little chance of playing outside Francophone territories and showcases.
Maybe if Assayas had kept it as a ruminative film essay it could have worked – that’s where it seems to be going at the start, when his voiceover cascades through memories of the countryside house where he grew up south-west of Paris. He speaks of his parents, his childhood, the house, its rooms and furnishings, even the neighbor’s house. Through the course of the film he shifts back to this personalized narrative, like an illustrated lecture which has a certain mesmeric attraction in the way it courses through his memories, painting an idyllic, privileged childhood. The privilege isn’t the problem – we all look for cinematic escape in the lives of the better-off – but there’s something willfully hermetic about it all, focused on this small world in a way that might succeed in novel form but here feels so minute.
This is only a small part of Suspended Time, which is largely a fictionalized evocation of Assayas’s time back at the family home during the pandemic. He’s once again cast Vincent Macaigne, this time as his alter-ego Paul, a germophobe filmmaker in lockdown with his much younger girlfriend Morgane (Nine d’Urso) and his brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) with his girlfriend Carole (Nora Hamzawi). It’s a big house, everyone has their own space apart from the kitchen area and there’s lots of grounds to wander, but naturally there’s tension when brothers who’ve not lived together for a long time are forced by circumstances to cohabit again. Paul orders from Amazon, which bothers Etienne, a dj focused on 1960s and ‘70s rock who’s the more ecologically aware of the two. Etienne makes crèpes – a lot – and Paul lectures on all the ways he’s learned to disinfect things from the internet. Never has the pandemic felt so trivialized or passé.
And so it goes, around and around, until we too wish we could just drive away. The rapport between Paul and Morgane fails to support the idea that they’ve been a couple for several years, and only Carole is fully sympathetic, more balanced than the others and trying to find common ground. How one yearns for Summer Hours, Assayas’s beautifully crafted and far more intelligent ode to a family and inheritance gradually coming apart. It’s as if he’s exchanged the earlier film’s emotional depth for shallow psychology and navel gazing, striving unsuccessfully to somehow reproduce Hockney’s lockdown rediscovery of life’s joys.
Visually the film is almost as bright as a Hockney painting, with Eric Gautier’s usual sensitivity to beautifully lit interiors and sun-dappled woods. We gaze longingly at the magnificent 18th century cabinet in the study, the carefully organized antiquarian books on the shelves, the intriguingly carved doors, but sitting in the audience, the key accompanying thought is just how much nicer the house would be with other people in it.
Director, screenwriter: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Vincent Macaigne, Micha Lescot, Nine d’Urso, Nora Hamzawi, Maud Wyler, Dominique Reymond, Magdalena Lafont
Producers: Olivier Delbosc, Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Eric Gautier
Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe
Costume design: Jürgen Doering
Editing: Marion Monnier
Sound: Romain Cadilhac, Sarah Leu, Nicolas Moreau, Olivier Goinard
Production companies: Curiosa Films, Vortex Sutra
World sales: Playtime
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (International competition)
In French
105 minutes
