Worlds away from his geopolitical thrillers such as Demonlover, Carlos, Wasp Network, and the forthcoming Wizard of the Kremlin, Olivier Assayas’s SUSPENDED TIME is micro-personal and very, very French. In conversation with the moods and rhythms of signature works by Éric Rohmer and Assayas’s longtime—now former—partner Mia Hansen-Løve, this frankly autobiographical film turns the stasis of the recent pandemic years into a time machine, detailing the customs, passions, and neuroses of a pair of brothers quarantined in semi-rural isolation in their childhood home.
Discovering a past they might have thought they’d left behind, filmmaker Paul (Vincent Macaigne) and music journalist Etienne (Micha Lescot) are surrounded by the trappings of their highly cultured upbringing—the history contained in the art books and other household appointments that stand as temporal souvenirs as well as standards of what to live up to, or escape. But escape is followed by return. With sharp humor, SUSPENDED TIME—which was filmed in the house Assayas and his brother Michka grew up in outside of Paris—revels in the absurdity of the brothers’ forced cohabitation. Witnessed and tolerated by their partners Morgane (Nine d’Urso) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi), who find the brothers’ concerns “banal,” they argue over socks and culinary methods and COVID protocols and the morality of Amazon deliveries. “Society has conditioned you to be a spoiled child,” Etienne declares, impatient with Paul’s happy acquiescence to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. (In real life, Assayas spent this fraught yet productive lockdown period writing and organizing the HBO version of his 1996 film Irma Vep, a series which starred Macaigne as film director René Vidal.)
With a novelist’s command of the metastability of memory, Assayas navigates late-career projects while looking back to a time when “painting was too lonely and cinema was a long way off.” A richly detailed index of culture, SUSPENDED TIME provides an exquisite adjournment—a window through which to observe and reflect on the manifold constructs of art. See links below for screening details.
SUSPENDED TIME
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas
Laemmle Royal
11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles
Film at Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th Street, New York City
Olivier Assayas, Suspended Time (2024), from top: Nine d’Urso (left) and Vincent Macaigne; Macaigne; Micha Lescot (left) and Nora Hamzawi; Suspended Time North American poster; d’Urso; Macaigne.
Images courtesy and © Music Box Films.
