By now there have been a fair number of films in which the COVID-19 pandemic figures in the story. Ari Aster’s recent “Eddington” was a fairly hysterical and reactionary one. “Suspended Time,” a nakedly autobiographical effort from the French writer-director Olivier Assayas, is a lyrical one. The very idea seems a little off, but that’s part of what makes the movie such a profound delight.
The movie begins with a narrator—the director himself—speaking of the small estate in rural France where he spent much of his childhood. The place is soon to be inhabited by four adults. Vincent Macaigne, who has been playing Assayas’s surrogate for a few years—beginning with 2018’s “Non-Fiction,” and continuing with the audacious 2022 mini-series “Irma Vep”—here plays a character named Paul Berger. But in cutaways, which display still pictures and documents, it’s clear—that is, readable—that there’s no real distance between creator and character. Except, of course, that which Assayas chooses. I’ve met and interviewed Assayas on multiple occasions, and he’s a touch more suave than Macaigne’s portrayal. (I’ve sometimes said that Macaigne reminds me of a French Charlie Day.)
Paul is, in a word, frantic. “I’ve spent a lifetime running away from this house,” he tells his therapist during a FaceTime session. But he soon settles into his neurotic routines. He monitors his phone for updates about infection trends. He orders items from Amazon and keeps the boxes outside the door of the entry to the house’s kitchen. Washes his hands regularly. And so on. His brother, Etienne, is a music journalist and historian. Played by Micha Lescot sporting a salt-and-pepper beard and good hair, he’s the suave one of the pair, albeit kind of tetchy, driven to distraction by Paul’s tetchiness. When Paul purchases a small saucepan from Amazon, he can’t wait to stew some strawberries in it. He takes Etienne’s advice to leave it be on the stove a little too long. This ruins the fruit and chars the bottom of the saucepan. Paul’s efforts to scour the saucepan clean as Etienne sits at a kitchen table, himself stewing, compose a leitmotif of mutual annoyance.
Their sensible girlfriends, Carole (Nora Hamzawi) and Morgane (Nine D’Urso) stay above the fray. During amiable dinner sessions, the brothers try to outdo each other playing nostalgia-inducing novelty tunes off their iPhones. The Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy and the Red Baron” gets a workout. Paul contemplates the letters of Heloise and Abelard. An interview with Jean Renoir plays on a podcast. Paul tries to take the example of David Hockney, who has recently painted in an area not too far from where this gang is set up. On a Zoom call, Paul speculates that his industry will “reorganize itself according to rigid rules.” Trying to manage his radio job, Etienne begins recording a podcast commemorating the musicians whose lives have been lost to the pandemic: British keyboardist Dave Greenfield of the Stranglers, Cameroonian sax and vibes player Manu Dibango, and American singer-songwriter John Prine.
While Paul doesn’t get even vaguely cured of any of his neuroses, he does experience a quiet epiphany of sorts: one of relief. He notes that he’s been very suddenly divested of the responsibility for keeping up with anything: his work, his career (two distinct things, as it happens), etc. If, on any given day, he can get past his anxieties, there are simple pleasures to be had: food, companionship, the environment. And the silences, below which one can sense whispers of the past. Structurally sound while at the same time lacking anything you could call a “plot,” “Suspended Time” invites you to listen in your own life to that which is often neglected or unheard.
