Close Quarters
By Vikram Murthi
Suspended Time
Dir. Olivier Assayas, France, Music Box Films
Olivier Assayas’s Suspended Time takes place in the director’s own provincial family home, an idyllic country estate in the Chevreuse Valley that acts as both sanctuary and museum, a place where ghosts reside alongside the living. Art and literature line the walls of the house while surrounded by serene meadows spreading across a seemingly infinite landscape. Cinematographer Éric Gautier, who previously photographed Assayas’s Summer Hours (2008), another film about a tranquil country home filled with specters of the past, films the property with an adoring, slightly somber eye, taking care to accentuate the ways its verdant character conceals its archaic spirit.
Two fictional couples inhabit Assayas’s real-life home: Paul (Vincent Macaigne) and Morgane (Nine d’Urso), and Paul’s younger brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi). It’s the spring of 2020 and the quartet are isolating together while COVID razes society. The mood is mostly harmonious, if topped with a healthy dollop of passive aggression. Neurotic and fastidious under ideal circumstances, Paul assumes the mantle of amateur COVID warrior, the type of person who leaves packages outside the abode and charts infection rates like an amateur epidemiologist. Etienne, annoyed by his brother’s obsessive tendencies, needles him about his paranoid behavior. The two haven’t lived together in years; sometimes their interactions make them seem like bickering kids, and other times their contrasting dispositions, not to mention their disparate physical types, lend the impression that they’re barely related. Meanwhile, the women offer their older partners level-headed advice about treating their sibling with patience and kindness.
The film’s light comedy largely stems from the claustrophobic fraternal conflict, with the noise of Paul scouring a freshly burnt saucepan serving as a motif of Etienne’s bubbling resentment, which predictably boils over. Assayas forgoes a conventional narrative in favor of a lattice of conversations about art’s lasting value and contemporary ethical responsibility. Paul contemplates the letters of Abelard and Heloise and waxes poetic about David Hockney’s work, which eventually tests Morgane’s patience. Etienne chastises Paul’s repeated Amazon purchases, accusing him of turning a blind eye to the company’s appalling work conditions, and occasionally voices skepticism about the efficacy of society’s collective safeguards.
Predictably, Assayas has zero interest in choosing sides in any debates his characters raise. He cares more about capturing the texture of early-pandemic life, a creative goal that extends far beyond mere period immersion. Suspended Time features plenty of the latter—frequently interrupted Zoom calls to colleagues on iPads and desktops, contemporary nods to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) and Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul,” anxious pre-vaccine discussions about the future of art-making and the politics of unlimited screen time for bored children—but Assayas doesn’t deploy these references to flatter viewers’ short-term memories. They’re stitches in a larger mood pattern that represent the feeling of time slowing to a crawl. Scenes of the group nostalgically cataloguing songs from their youth, or Morgane getting sucked into a podcast about Jean Renoir whilst cleaning a room reflect the long idle stretches of my pandemic experience to a T.
Anyone privileged enough not to work in the public-facing service economy was compelled to generate new at-home routines during the early days of COVID. More so than its (scant few) pandemic-set contemporaries, Suspended Time acutely understands how previously occupied mental space in adults became vacant for the first time. (There’s a reason why inchoate creative hobbies, like cooking and crafts, had spread like wildfire.) For Assayas’s cerebral characters, that mostly means recommitting to the intellectually demanding art that dominated their academic pasts. Suspended Time primarily depicts this through Paul’s reengagement with literature and paintings from his youth, but it’s supplemented by Assayas’s essayistic voiceover in which he uses his familial environment as a springboard to comb through his own past. By describing and cataloguing his father’s old office or the winding paths surrounding the home, he opens a portal to his own personal history and invites the viewer inside.
Unless you already know Assayas’s voice, Suspended Time doesn’t immediately clarify the voiceover’s identity or whether it’s supposed to represent the internal monologue of one of the film’s characters. (Only when Assayas cites filming Irma Vep (1996) midway through the film does our proverbial light bulb turn on.) It’s part of a slippery auto-fictive game that Suspended Time plays. Macaigne is once again a functional stand-in for Assayas, following similar turns in Non-Fiction (2018) and the Irma Vep miniseries (2022). Like Etienne, Assayas’s brother is also a music journalist. Maud Wyler plays Paul’s ex-wife and shares broad similarities to his ex-partner Mia Hansen-Løve. (These are loose parallels, of course; none of these characters quite resemble their real-life counterparts, physically or behaviorally.) Assayas has always placed himself in his work: his May 68-influenced adolescence in Cold Water (1994) and Something in the Air (2012), his anxieties about the state of the film industry in both Irma Vep and Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), his conflicted embrace of modern technology in demonlover (2002) and Personal Shopper (2016). But Suspended Time is the first time he has explicitly “starred” in one of his own films, with the film’s lightly fictional distance providing him space to take the stage.
Assayas’s Guy Debordian remembrances hover above the low-key adult drama like a Greek chorus, informing the action without directly referencing it. His invisible presence elevates the romantic melancholy that courses through the film. Each of the film’s four characters has an adult life’s worth of emotional baggage that they carry around like a comfortable accessory, and yet their respective romantic relationships provide them hope for a future that the news cannot provide. Etienne and Carole have come out the other side of divorce and infidelity to a stronger, mutually stable place; when Carole departs to spend time with her children, it leaves Etienne emotionally tetchy and bereft. Paul and Morgane are a rock that the tide can’t overturn. Each challenges and flatters the other with ease because they’re intellectually compatible as well. (It helps considerably that every actor delivers a completely lived-in performance, especially d’Urso, whose remarkably unaffected demeanor makes her the immediate standout.)
Paul admits to his therapist over a video call on his phone, which he has propped up against a tree trunk in a garden near his home, that quarantine has been beneficial for him because it allowed him to reconnect with the artistic passions that have molded his life. As much as COVID was a communal event, it also provided a pretext for crucial existential inquiries that many had deferred for far too long. Obviously this respite from standard operating procedure was in near-constant tension with easily accessible news about the pandemic’s death toll, a disquieting irony that Assayas visually highlights via the gap between the film’s beautiful backdrop and the circumstances of the characters’ cohabitation. As troubling an idea as it may be, one that illustrates the enormous divide between the comfortable and the systemically disadvantaged, it took a global pandemic bringing society to a halt for some people to sit and reflect upon their lives in an attempt to reach some bone-deep conclusions about themselves.
If Suspended Time had limited this thematic idea to Paul’s own intellectual exploration, the film might feel a little threadbare. By infusing the film with Assayas’s own recollections, however, it becomes intimately connected with material reality. In Suspended Time’s best scene, Assayas narrates a digressive memory over shots of Paul running. At first, he explains how he embraced jogging in his adult life and catalogs the route he takes while Paul moves through the same area. But then it transitions to black-and-white scenes of a young man, possibly Assayas as child but possibly someone else entirely, running over the same ground, which inspires more unrelated memories of his thesis, past mentors and girlfriends, and the way the environment felt against his skin. Though plenty moving on its own terms, the sequence becomes weightier when you realize that Assayas only embarked upon memory lane in the first place because the pandemic forced him to be alone with his thoughts, a time when he wondered if he would ever again make a film. Suddenly, fiction and reality, life and art, Assayas and his characters, all collapse into one shared tapestry.
In the epilogue, Paul informs his young daughter that he has signed over the family home to her so she can appreciate it long after he’s gone. (A pointed rebuke of the understandable decision the extended family made in Summer Hours, perhaps.) While the house has aesthetic and sentimental value all on its own, the ghosts that occupy the space have always transcended its borders. They only need a pretense to appear as a reminder that memories, of past art and lives, have a place in the future as well. Suspended Time illustrates a simple, potent truth: when the world stops, the mind reels.