‘Suspended Time’: Berlin Review

Dir. Olivier Assayas. France. 2024. 105mins

Endless Amazon deliveries, instructional hand washing videos, obsessive cooking fads (elsewhere sourdough bread; in France, apparently, crêpes)… Remember those strange early days of the pandemic? Olivier Assayas does, and documents them so minutely – and, in an odd way, nostalgically – that his Berlin Competition entry Suspended Time may conceivably be cinema’s first period movie about early lockdown.

May conceivably be cinema’s first period movie about early lockdown

In reality, the film is more than that: a poetic memoir, a brittle family-tension comedy, a game playing on the twin registers of storytelling and autobiography, in the tradition of that French literary genre called ‘autofiction’. But despite engaging performances, the film is a little too inward-looking to be of significant appeal outside a devoted Francophile circuit, while the comedy-drama content is a little slender to really engage – especially by the standards of Assayas, at his best one of France’s more unpredictably inventive auteurs.

The film begins with a voice-over from Assayas himself, introducing us to his setting, the village of Montabé in Essonne, south of Paris, where the director’s childhood home is located. It is an idyllic rural milieu that, as seen in a montage of shots by long-standing Assayas collaborator Eric Gautier, resembles the hallowed, sun-dappled paintings of the Impressionist era. Indeed, one of the explicit themes contemplated by Assayas is cinema’s need to reconnect with nature, as in the work of Monet.

It is in that childhood home that the film-maker is spending the early days of lockdown in April 2020 – or, if not quite Assayas himself, then his alter ego Paul, played by Vincent Macaigne (who contributed an irresistible impersonation of Assayas’s speech patterns to the director’s recent TV series Irma Vep). Paul, like Assayas a film critic-turned-director, is stuck for three months of lockdown in the old book-lined family home with his brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) – who, like the director’s own sibling Michka Assayas, is a rock critic and broadcaster. The brothers, both divorced, are accompanied by their girlfriends; respectively, documentarist Morgane (a brisk performance from model Nine d’Urso, currently in TV fashion biopic series Cristóbal Balenciaga) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi, previously seen alongside Macaigne in Assayas’s 2018 Non-Fiction).

Not a lot happens, as befits a lockdown drama. The men get neurotic about their various obsessions – making crêpes in Etienne’s case, a burned kitchen pot and multiple hygiene worries for Paul. The latter talks on his iPhone to his therapist (Dominique Reynaud), and Etienne records his radio show, including a tribute to the late Stranglers keyboard player Dave Greenfield, an early Covid-19 casualty. They also talk excitedly about people they knew on the late 70s Parisian punk scene, while the women roll their eyes with tender indulgence. Neither female character registers nearly as strongly as the men – despite a thread involving Morgane’s putative doc on Flaubert – and it comes as a bracing relief when Paul’s film-maker ex (Maud Wyler) responds to him, online and then in person, with considerably less of a soft touch.

Interspersed between episodes in and around the house – notably Paul’s testy dialogues with his laidback, ageing groover brother – are voice-over passages, sometimes with black and white dramatised inserts, in which Assayas muses on his own childhood, student years and first love, involving a woman seen in some artistically blurry nude black and whites. It’s hard to know how much of what he recounts in melancholy tones is strictly true, or how much game-playing is involved. But what is unmistakably authentic is Assayas’s erudition, filmic, musical and literary, with perhaps too many names dropped throughout (Modigliani, Boileau, Villon, Renoir père et fils) to make the film entirely welcoming for viewers who might not themselves have quite as much cultural capital to toss casually around.

Of course, as in TV’s Irma Vep, where the ever-watchable Macaigne lampooned him in surrogate form, Assayas is sending himself up – while at the same time being deadly serious about memory and heritage (the opening monologue is as Proustian as contemporary French cinema gets). Another name dropped is Quentin Tarantino, whom the brothers enthuse about – but a film-maker who is more likely, unavoidably, to occur to viewers is Woody Allen, whose cultivated neuroticism is echoed as the brothers revert to the mutual irritation of childhood. Unfortunately, however confidently Macaigne works his genially shambling nerd persona, the comedy of manners never comes across as sharply as you would hope from a director whose comic mode can be relishably trenchant.

Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect too much polish or closure from a film that essentially has the loose feel of a hybrid fiction-cum-diary experiment, and that aims – pretty successfully – to capture the unreal mood of a moment somehow outside the normal flow of history. But Suspended Time, while intriguing as another instalment in the ongoing, free-ranging course of the Assayas canon, never quite gels as a convincing stand-alone piece.