Suspended Time Review: Assayas’ Lockdown Tale Finds Inspiration in Isolation

You’d think that after two years of this pandemic nonsense, we’d have had our fill of isolation stories. But leave it to critically acclaimed director Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper, Irma Vep) to find nuance and insight in the banality of lockdown life.

In his latest film Suspended Time, Assayas brings us into his own personal experience, chronicling a few weeks quarantining in his childhood countryside home. It’s a pleasant enough setting, filled with books, art, and family memories. But still, uncertainty lingers.

We follow Assayas’ on-screen alter ego Paul, an anxiety-prone filmmaker confined with his girlfriend and brother’s family. Tensions flare over disagreements both trivial (how long germs last on Amazon boxes) and existential (lamenting time lost to a career put on hold).

Moments of profundity peek through the mundane: mourning deceased parents, rediscovering a childhood home’s history, wondering if life will ever be the same. It’s this tension between routine and rumination that Assayas explores with charm and nuance unmatched by other pandemic films.

So while we’d normally rather move on from 2020, Assayas’ introspective touch convinces us to give isolation stories another chance. Join him on a journey back to the early days of the pandemic, when sitting at home felt novel, scary, and just a little bit magical.

Finding Meaning in the Mundane

Set in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, Suspended Time brings us to the French countryside home of director Olivier Assayas. Here he holes up with his brother Etienne, a music journalist, and their respective partners Morgane and Carole.

Despite the unfortunate global circumstances, it’s not a bad place to spend lockdown – an airy, art-filled house nestled amongst verdant gardens and woods.  Assayas uses both fictional characters and self-referential moments to chronicle this strange period where days blur together.

At the story’s center are the two very different brothers. Anxiety-prone filmmaker Paul obsesses over news reports, disinfecting routines, and ephemeral virus transmission statistics. By contrast, Etienne breezily adjusts to their confined reality, focusing his energies on perfecting homemade pancakes.

These contrasting reactions to pandemic life fuel both comic moments and philosophical debates. The couples bicker over petty annoyances like Amazon deliveries and workout spaces, but also touch on profound ideas like fading careers, mortality, and the essence of creativity.

Assayas himself narrates portions of the film, guiding us through his personal connections to the home itself – its history, architecture, and relics from past generations. The voiceovers lend poetic weight to the mundane daily events, questioning our relationship with time, nature, and each other.

What plot exists follows more of an observational arc rather than a traditionally structured storyline. Tensions escalate and ultimately erupt in an argument between the brothers, airing some harsh truths. But overall Suspended Time remains a meditative glimpse at finding inspiration and connection within a fearful, uncertain moment.

Through poetically captured meals, walks in the woods, and family conversations, Assayas distills life’s profundity from its simplest pleasures and routines.

Blending Reality and Reflection

More than a pandemic time capsule, Suspended Time uses its premise to explore universal themes of time, memory, and human connection. Assayas blends fictional vignettes with memoir-like voiceovers to arrive at insights both profound and mundane.

At its heart, this is a film about the strange distortion of time that isolation can bring. The first weeks of pandemic life seem to stretch on indefinitely even as our regular sense of passing days fades. Assayas questions our perception of time itself through the lives abruptly put on hold – the filmmaker and musician uncertain if their careers will resume.

Yet even as time feels suspended, Assayas finds connection by probing his own memories tied to the places and objects that surround him. Reminiscing on childhood moments or his last conversations with deceased parents, he uncovers profound meaning in the everyday.

DP Eric Gautier lends the film an airy, verdant beauty through sun-kissed country vistas and wandering Steadicam shots. The camerawork meshes nicely with Assayas’ ruminative voiceovers, creating a dreamy, poetic atmosphere. Moments of familiarly mundane pandemic life – Zoom calls, meal prep, household chores – contrast beautifully with the timeless French countryside.

Like its characters, Suspended Time remains caught between strange interludes of profundity and boredom. But Assayas ultimately transforms the everyday into the existential, finding pockets of inspiration and connection that give our isolated lives meaning.

Pandemic Insights Gleamed from Life on Pause

At its best, Suspended Time provides poignant observations on life abruptly put on pause. Assayas transforms quiet moments – a meal, a wander through childhood woods – into profound insights on time and memory. It’s an uneven balance, but when the film taps into the universality of this strange moment, it resonates.

The fictional storyline follows more of a slice-of-life character study than a traditional narrative. Vincent Macaigne aptly conveys the anxieties of Assayas’ on-screen doppelgänger, neurotic filmmaker Paul. Yet while humorous and sympathetic, Paul lacks complexity as a character. Music writer Etienne emerges as the more compelling brother, portrayed with charm and hidden depths by Micha Lescot.

Unfortunately, the women orbiting these men fade into the background; we never access the interior lives of Paul’s girlfriend Morgane or Etienne’s partner Carole. Here Assayas misses an opportunity to show pandemic life from multiple viewpoints.

Instead we get intriguing but limited self-reflection from the director himself via memoir-like voiceovers. These esoteric musings sometimes lose momentum, sacrificing relatability for pretentious name-dropping.

Yet despite uneven pacing and character development, when Assayas taps into universal anxieties and curiosities surrounding this period, Suspended Time truly suspends time. We share in the idle questionings about how long the virus survives on boxes, or what it means to fear contaminating those we love.

In the film’s most compelling moments, Assayas transforms life’s simple routines – cooking, exercising, working from home – into conduits for existential rumination. Through a wandering Steadicam over a lovingly captured French countryside, he allows us to rediscover, as if for the first time, the beauty surrounding us that quarantine isolation obscured. Suspended Time offers less of a storyline than a chance to inhabit the wand.

A Slice of Life… With Meaning

As both time capsule and rumination, Suspended Time encapsulates the strangeness of life abruptly on hold, for better or worse. Moments overwhelm with mundane triviality, others glow with profundity – much like lockdown itself.

Assayas likely intended this film as a personal processing of an unprecedented global moment. But when he taps into universal questions surrounding time, memory, and human connection, Suspended Time becomes a worthwhile glimpse into the collective pandemic psyche.

The film reveals Assayas’ talent for finding poignant details amidst life’s overlooked moments, whether cooking with family or wandering alone through the countryside. Fans will recognize his introspective touch as he transforms isolation’s routine into opportunities for inspiration.

Yet those unversed in his indulgent style may lose patience with the film’s privileged viewpoint and lack of traditional narrative. Assayas asks much from the viewer – a willingness to find resonant meaning tucked between mundane scenes lacking momentum or tension.

But for those open to exploring life’s strangeness during a strange time, Suspended Time offers intelligently crafted doses of normalcy sprinkled with insight from a renowned film poet. We glimpse the tension between mundanity and meaning that colored life in limbo through the eyes of someone with the talent to elevate the everyday.