‘Suspended Time’ Review: Olivier Assayas’s Wily and Wise Idyll of Home As a Refuge

By virtue of the shared experiences it speaks to, Suspended Time may be writer-director Olivier Assayas’s most universally relatable film to date. Sure, few people own homes in charming villages in rural France, but almost everyone on the planet went through some version of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. People variably learned recipes, thought up new projects, sought out online therapy, went on long, unusually silent walks, contemplated their pasts, grandstanded about the dangers of a virus, treated said grandstanding as excessive hysteria, and got frustrated with the people they were in insolation with.

Those are the events of Suspended Time in a nutshell—a window into the strange life we all lived, the memory of which we largely seem to have discarded like a spoiled sourdough starter. Missing from the above description, though, is the way Assayas augments the ethereal quality of life in isolation with a sophisticated but playful interweaving of fiction and the reality behind it.

Paul (Vincent Macaigne) is a filmmaker sheltering in his childhood home in the village of Montabé with his new girlfriend, Morgane (Nine d’Urso). Paul shares ownership of the house with his brother, Etienne (Micha Lescot), an erstwhile musician who’s figuring out how to remotely host his radio programs about classic rock luminaries, and who’s brought his own new girlfriend, Carole (Mora Hamzawi), to spend lockdown with Paul and Morgane.

The quartet appears to spend much of the day interrupting each other’s day-to-day activities, from Zoom work-out classes to arbitrary crepe-making, with passive-aggressive squabbles. While Paul frets about how long the Covid-19 virus can survive on cardboard packaging, the insouciant Etienne adjusts to lockdown comparatively easily. Then, at night, in the true fashion of a French summer, they convivially break bread and pour wine during their languorous outdoor dinners, the brothers reminiscing about their more bohemian days in ’90s Paris.

It’s difficult to imagine the neurotic Paul, an obvious stand-in for Assayas, as ever having been a purveyor of Parisian cool. Suspended Time is full of self-ironic characterizations. At one point, Assayas, whose collaborations with Kristen Stewart helped elevate the Twilight star to international critical darling, has Paul suggest to Morgane an idea for a banal-sounding nun movie starring Stewart. In Zoom calls with his ex-partner and fellow filmmaker, Flavia (Maud Wyler), Paul comes off as something of a childish dope—perhaps a confession of sorts given that, in real life, Assayas is 26 years older than his ex, filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve.

That self-consciously narcissistic aspect of the film is amusing as far as it goes; self-castigating auteurs are hardly a new presence in prestige cinema. Far more imaginative is the sharing of the first-person voiceover narration between Paul and what feels like Assayas himself. When, at one point, the narrator identifies himself as the director of Irma Vep, the only possible conclusion is that while we may be watching Assayas’s alter ego, we’re listening to the director himself.

The voiceover tells us that the pandemic suspended time itself before proceeding to meander through Assayas’s own reflections and biography throughout the rest of the film. The personalities of Paul and the narrator are split: Where Paul frequently seems petty and unoriginal, the narrator’s voice guides us through a sensitive and carefully composed contemplation of what it means for time to stand still. During these interstitial monologues, Assayas sometimes presents us with paintings—Claude Monet and David Hockney (the latter an obsession of Paul’s and, presumably, Assayas’s)—like we’re suddenly watching the end of Andrei Rublev or Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames. The Assayasean voice of the narrator questions whether cinema, like painting, gives us an image of time suspended in motion.

Wherever the film waxes essayistic, it takes on a philosophical elegance mostly alien to Paul, though there’s a recurring moment where the narrator and character appear to merge. That’s during Paul’s therapy sessions, which he conducts via a smartphone that he props into a thicket at the base of a tree. Here, Paul’s thoughts go far enough beyond pandemic panic that it’s tempting to think that this is the source of the narration. Assayas frames these beautifully styled shots from behind the thicket so that we can’t see the phone, with Paul seeming to sit among the violets of the forest and smiling vaguely into space. It’s as if the film suddenly becomes a dreamily Impressionist depiction of the bourgeoisie reconvening with nature.

As Paul always makes sure to piously, obnoxiously acknowledge, lockdown was a scary time for many, but for those lucky enough to accept the downtime and shelter in place, it allowed a kind of logical reduction in our lives, a temporal pocket in which we could eliminate extraneous conditions and get down to basics before going back to the reality of death, taxes, and appointments. Suspended Time performs this logical reduction and finds, as its finale avers, love as the core term of human existence. It’s perhaps not a conclusion supported by the plot alone, but it’s such a gently smart and warm-spirited film that one is inclined to cede the point.