SUSPENDED TIME (HORS DU TEMPS) (France 2024) **1/2
Directed by Olivier Assayas

The film SUSPENDED TIME is so called as it is as if time stood still during the lockdown of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  The film is set during the April 2020 lockdown.  It follows two brothers, Paul (a film director) and Etienne (a music journalist), who are confined together in their childhood home in the French countryside. They’re joined by their respective romantic partners, Morgane and Carole.   The old house is large, its rooms, objects, and the surrounding landscape trigger memories and reflections: of parents, neighbours, absences, childhood, past relations, much of which is revealed through the film’s voiceover.

As society recedes in the spring of 2020, film director Paul Berger (Vincent Macaigne) returns to his childhood home in the provincial Chevreuse Valley. Still processing the legacy of his parents and feeling out the uncertain shape of the world to come, Paul hunkers down with his documentary filmmaker girlfriend Carole (Nora Hamzawi), his music journalist brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), and Etienne’s new girlfriend Morgan (Nine d’Urso). Squabbling over the minutiae of health protocols and the morality of a hermetic lifestyle mediated by ubiquitous online shopping, the makeshift household finds new ways to lacerate familiar wounds.

Yet Paul also finds a surprising refuge in the compulsory quietude of pandemic life, an opportunity to reconnect with the books and art and enchanted forests of his youth. A scabrous French comedy from master filmmaker Olivier Assayas, Suspended Time is a sharply personal and fiercely neurotic ode to the eternal expanse of memory and the allure of life beyond our personal screens.

Though SUSPENDED TIME attempts to project what it would be like to isolate during the Pandemic, what transpires on screen is not what the general public would go through.  In the film, the two brothers and their respective partners stay in a beautiful countryside house and experience the beauty of the outside.  They undoubtedly isolate, but the isolation feels more like a secluded holiday than any imprisonment due to COVID-19.  Another point is that the filmmaker and the journalist talk a lot about art and their experiences, which are way above those of many of the audience.  In the evening scene, when they play a tune to be identified or the film the tune was taken from, much of what is played cannot be recognized by the average moviegoer.

The two brothers, Paul and Etienne, get on each other’s nerves, which results in one shouting match.  Paul is more annoying, and watching these two on film can require a bit of patience.

Yet Assayas’s film is not without charm.  Though nothing much happens, and the nuances of the characters begin to bother each other, for example, the volume of the music or what they want to do, like read or watch a movie, there are cute observations where one can laugh at the follies of humans.

The film contains lots of voiceover that gives the audience more perspective of what is going on and how the characters react and feel.  The tactic was used very much in Francois Truffaut’s DEUX ANGLAISES ET LE CONTINENT and this film feels like Truffaut’s classic.

SUSPENDED TIME opened only in the United States recently and will premiere in Canada, being available on Digital September 30th.

Trailer: