‘Suspended Time’ Review: Olivier Assayas Fails to Find Meaning in the Monotony of Pandemic Lockdown

David Rooney
·5 min read
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No two words can strike fear into the heart of a critic quite like “COVID movie,” and yet with a director as accomplished as Olivier Assayas it seemed reasonable to hold out hope of something more than the low-key cringe humor of a neurotic germaphobe obsessing about masks and social distancing and possible grocery contamination. Sadly, that’s a big part of what you get in the tedious Suspended Time (Hors du Temps). Most of us would never think our experience in the early, anxious days of pandemic lockdown was of much interest to anyone outside our social pod, but filmmakers keep making that mistake. They need to stop.

Perhaps Assayas was so caught up in the meta film industry satire of his spry reimagining of Irma Vep for HBO that he couldn’t resist casting Vincent Macaigne again as another version of himself. Macaigne is mildly amusing as a film director named Paul, full of nervous energy and gnawing concerns ranging from illness to career limbo, from trying to salvage a burnt saucepan to more existential questions.

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He’s quarantining with his brother, rock journalist Etienne (Micha Lescot), in their childhood home nestled in the sun-kissed bucolic countryside in the Chevreuse Valley near Paris. Etienne has his flinty side but in general is way more mellow than Paul, though perhaps it’s his therapeutic quest to make the perfect crepe that helps take the edge off.

Also in residence are the siblings’ girlfriends, both recent enough additions to the men’s lives to make this the first time either couple has lived under the same roof. The women’s easygoing presence serves as a calming influence throughout. Only when Etienne’s partner Carole (Nora Hamzawi) has to go back to the city late in the film, leaving him for the first time alone with Paul and Morgane (Nine D’Urso), does he explode, vomiting up enraged resentment toward his monomaniacal brother in a standout scene that finally unearths some conflict in the endless streams of talk.

Even by French standards, this is an incredibly talky movie. It’s punctuated by Paul’s lengthy voiceovers — about the town and region; the neighboring homes and their owners; the trees and gardens; the furniture, art and books in their house, so loaded with memories of their late parents and grandparents — which often have a pleasing beauty and lightness. That aspect is fortified physically by the use of Assayas’ actual family home. But the voiceovers also feel like lumps of prose in a film too busy navel-gazing to build narrative shape or momentum.

An autobiographical companion piece of sorts to Summer Hours, the director’s ineffably lovely 2008 film about a family reconvening in a country house filled with art and memories, Suspended Time does provide some of the pleasures frequently associated with Assayas’ work. That notably includes the unfussy, crystalline naturalism of longtime cinematographer Eric Gautier’s images, the fluid editing, the intermittent bursts of vintage rock.

Mostly, however, the project feels like the result of a writer-director killing time, sketching impressions of a life put on hold by outside circumstances, without figuring out what he wants to say with it all. There’s only so much reward to be gained from connecting self-referential in-jokes to various points in Assayas’ career, even if I did prick up my ears at the mention of an abandoned project to star Kristen Stewart — so great in the director’s Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper — as a Portuguese nun.

For an auteur nearing 70, with almost four decades of work behind him that includes a generous share of absolute jewels, there’s a disappointing shortage of perspective to the insights here. The collision of past, present and uncertain future is more interesting as an idea than a satisfyingly developed narrative, and the self-examination that emerges during Paul’s weekly Zoom calls with his therapist (Dominique Reymond) and Facetime chats with his ex-partner (Maud Wyler) or industry colleagues never build much sense of intimate access.

It’s perhaps significant that the brother less inclined toward introspection and oversharing, Etienne, is the more compelling of the two main characters, even if his tinted shades and too-cool superiority keep him at a distance. That also allows Lescot, an actor new to Assayas’ orbit, to give his character shadings that the others lack.

Etienne is distinctly unlike Paul, regarding lockdown as an infringement on his freedom by the overreacting government and media. Even Paul’s preference for ordering on Amazon over risky in-person shopping bugs him. Paul, by contrast, finds confinement strangely reassuring, making him apprehensive about resuming regular life once an end to their isolation is in sight.

There’s potential in the thoughts on siblings who knew everything about each other while growing up but have less in common in adulthood suddenly finding themselves cohabiting and either leaning into or resisting their past connection. But Assayas is unable to locate the poignancy in that fraternal dance.

The women, while appealing, never acquire much dimension. A walking-and-talking scene through fields dotted with colorful wildflowers toward the end, in which Paul and Morgane end up sitting under a tree considering the grounding importance of love, just feels like a thoroughly routine place for a French film to go.

The director clearly is reflecting on the effects of time and experience in an environment rendered meaningful by its history but also separated from reality by the forced circumstances of lockdown. And yet the movie’s insularity feels trifling and empty. Admirers of Assayas hoping for a return to form after 2019’s frustratingly choppy and tangled spy thriller, Wasp Network, will have to keep waiting.

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