There is a recurring theme of a running joke in Suspended Time (previously known as Hors du Temps for English-speaking audiences). In his intricate, semi-autobiographical 2022 television series Irma Vep, where he portrays a filmmaker directing a movie titled _Irma Vep_—a film he had indeed created two decades earlier in real life—the actor playfully crafted a character resembling Assayas by capturing not only his distinctive reedy voice but also his peculiar irritability and sensitivities.
This character, named Rene, bears resemblance to Paul, the character portrayed by Macaigne in the narrative of two brothers sequestered with their partners throughout the Covid lockdown. They have revisited the childhood home they seldom returned to: a charming vine-covered cottage in a picturesque village. It is a radiant summer reminiscent of their childhood summers, with the sun shining incessantly.
If Assayas is truly embarking on a later-life rendition of François Truffaut’s symbiotic relationship with actor/avatar Jean-Pierre Léaud, using an alter ego to document his own life, he is evidently not seeking self-flattery. Similar to Rene, Paul is a film director who fixates on minutiae, with Covid offering ample material for his fixation. He meticulously follows hand-sanitation tutorials on YouTube while washing his hands, frets over handling mail and sanitizing clothes that may have come into contact with the postman’s deliveries, and meticulously disinfects door handles.
Paul and his brother Etienne (portrayed by Micha Lescot), a suave music journalist, are supposed to take turns fetching groceries. However, Paul’s intense fear of insufficiently distanced interactions with the masked shopkeeper when collecting supplies from the village shop’s outdoor boxes prevents him from fulfilling his share.
Paul’s compulsive online shopping habits involve daily purchases of socks or new saucepans, much to Etienne’s chagrin, who lectures him on the labor conditions in Amazon warehouses. Etienne, on the other hand, is fixated on perfecting his crêpe-making skills. The quartet prepares elaborate dinners enjoyed on the terrace, accompanied by copious amounts of wine, chain-smoking, and reminiscing about cringe-worthy songs from their youth—a quintessential French idyll. Despite occasional irritations between the brothers and the bustling kitchen atmosphere, they find solace in playing tennis on the adjacent empty house’s court.
In this fictionalized depiction of the Assayas family—where Olivier’s real-life brother is a music journalist—the characters are thriving during the lockdown period. Reflecting on their seclusion with his younger partner Carole (played by Nora Hamzawi), Paul likens their retreat to David Hockney’s Covid-era paintings. Assayas captures their playful garden antics in a style reminiscent of Eric Rohmer’s evocative sense-memory filmmaking.
Nevertheless, the house remains a shrine to their parents. Their father’s study remains untouched, filled with books that only Paul reads, thanks to Amazon’s continuous supply. Paul struggles to sleep in his mother’s bed, surrounded by his grandfather’s ’30s paintings of their family members watching over him, just as they did in his childhood.
The household is haunted by ghostly echoes, including the brothers themselves, who have long moved away from living together in this house or their student accommodations, adamantly avoiding revisiting this once dreary rural setting. Paul contemplates the estrangement he feels from his brother, akin to the distance he senses from his mother’s heirlooms. Are they reconstructing their relationship now, just as they are reevaluating their connection with the house?
Assayas conceived this film as a series of real-time reflections during Covid, subsequently filming it with the actors in the very house they inhabited. Is it self-indulgent? Certainly. Its insights may seem fleeting rather than profound or introspective; it is essentially a collection of musings that some viewers may find mundane or excessively open-ended, lacking a clear plot. The Covid lockdown, however, presented a unique hiatus from normalcy that most of us will likely never encounter again. As we continue to grapple with its long-term repercussions, Assayas’s film, though light-hearted and whimsical, offers a glimpse into that uncharted territory.