Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has apparently been deemed “minor.” It’s true, Suspended Time is resolutely, even defiantly, small-scaled, a time capsule of a very recent past that people seem determined to memory-hole. Suspended Time is a Covid movie, taking place during the early days of the 2020 lockdown. And while it hits some now overly familiar tropes of this peculiar subgenre — masking, wiping down groceries, anxieties over spacing between bodies — it’s also a quiet, often moving memory piece. Assayas is no stranger to autobiographical work, whether mining his childhood in oblique ways for Cold Water and Summer Hours or more directly in Something in the Air, and Suspended Time takes this mode a step further, incorporating voiceover narration from the filmmaker himself, as well as essayistic interludes that inject a documentary mode into the autofiction. It’s all very low-key, even subdued, but gradually a portrait emerges of a middle-aged man forced to confront major life changes, particularly with regard to how death becomes a material concern rather than an abstract idea.
As the film begins, filmmaker Paul (Assayas regular Vincent Macaigne) and his music journalist brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) are some weeks into cohabitating in their family’s country home in Chevreuse, a small hamlet south of Paris (the house is Assayas’ actual family home). They are joined by their respective girlfriends, Morgane (Nina D’Urso) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi). Morgane is some years younger than Paul, who shares custody of a young daughter with his ex-wife. Etienne and Carole, meanwhile, have been together for some time, although Etienne has only recently made the decision to leave his wife and formally declare his relationship with Carole. The quartet eat, drink, take Zoom calls, and otherwise fill their time with chatting and reading. It’s an extended reminiscence, a taking of stock not only for the characters, but for Assayas himself (who’s now pushing 70 years old).
The director’s frequent collaborator Eric Gautier keeps the framings simple, bathing everything in natural light, while Assayas’ narration acts as a kind of segue between scenes, as he intones on his own family’s history, memories of his father’s library, and a litany of artists who made an impression on him in his youth. There are a few asides about more contemporary matters; Assayas is clearly quite enamored of David Hockney, highlighting some of the famed artist’s digital works produced during lockdown, and of course Monet makes an appearance. It’s all very breezy, like a screwball comedy slowed down to the pace of a casual conversation with an old friend. As critic Filipe Furtado notes, the film is almost entirely devoid of conflict; Paul and Etienne bicker as brothers do, but it never boils over, to the point even that a scorched cooking pot (the result of a miscommunication between the two men) becomes a kind of recurring gag, with Paul desperately scrubbing at it rather than simply buying a new one. Noisy neighbors are a nuisance that are quickly laughed off, and frequent calls to therapists feel like checking in with an old friend rather than an outpouring of anxieties or neuroses.
Ultimately, there ends up being one moment that nicely encapsulates the film’s quiet power and movingly reflects its preoccupations. We hear an audio recording of the filmmaker Jean Renoir relating the moment his father, painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, passed away. The great artist was surrounded by family, and with his dying breath made some weak brushstrokes on a canvas. His last act was an artistic gesture, a lovely sentiment to consider as our world continues to spin off its axis. We can’t control everything, but we can at least try to leave something beautiful behind.
Published as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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