This has been described as a pandemic movie, but while it does take place during quarantine, it is more concerned with using it as an excuse for an exercise in autofiction centered on making the fiction as thin as possible. A filmmaker, his rock journalist brother and their current girlfriends go to their family country home to isolate and while it includes the expected tensions, it barely bothers generating drama. Vincent Macaigne who had already played the filmmaker in the Irma Vep remake is there as the not-Assayas, the family home is the Assayas family home and the actual main character, and the movie keeps returning to off-screen narration by the filmmaker himself that collapses things even more towards family history. It is high concept with nothing going on but its concept. At times, it seems to be almost daring the audience at how little movie there is there (Macaigne talking about the Letters from a Portuguese Nun adaptation he plans to make with Kristen Stewart feels truly perverse). Macagaine remains very engaging, but the drama is minimum and Assayas and Eric Gualtier in a very plain style, barely any effort to make it raw or immediate. It is interesting to think about Assayas and Desplechin twin careers, they were both seem as exciting fresh new faces in early 90s (that Assayas was a former Cahiers critic probably helped, that his dad was a screenwriter for the very unCahiers filmmakers like Rene Clement and Christian Jacque never come up back then), they got praised by most of the same critics, their budgets started to inflate around their 2004 films as it becomes inevitable to see them as the new establishment they both got into a passive-aggressive middle age crises were they seem unease at it but not so much to give up the perks and the budget, Desplechin seems to be in a constant respectable acting out, while Assayas goes ahead in a sort of stupor whose underlining of respectable signifiers go hand in hand with an increasing slow down of the filmmaker. Suspended Time feels very much about this, it is a very personal movie less for what it decides to put on its on-screen fiction, but in how self-conscious it is about how what is left is some bourgeois navel-gazing. Aging punk respectability is an awful look, but there is a moving honesty in dealing with how family tradition is hard to leave behind. This is probably a bad movie, but I liked watching it far more than a lot of good ones.