Olivier Assayas’s wistful, lightly off-kilter “Suspended Time” takes place in the spring of 2020, an interlude that few would want to revisit. The setting is a retreat in the Chevreuse Valley, a pastoral region about an hour’s drive from Paris and an even shorter distance from the Palace of Versailles. Here, amid vivid green hills and smatterings of largely unseen neighbors, two middle-aged brothers have fled the pandemic with both their respective neuroses and their girlfriends to a serenely beautiful country house. The brothers grew up in this refuge, which remains crowded with art, books and ghosts, so many ghosts.
The story is modestly scaled and largely centers on the brothers Paul (Vincent Macaigne) and Etienne (Micha Lescot) as well as their less-consequential partners, Morgane (Nine d’Urso) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi). A music journalist with an opulent silver mane and darkly tinted glasses that he wears no matter the hour, Etienne has a slender frame and a habit of needling his brother. He’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t bother to meet your gaze at a party. The shambolic Paul, a filmmaker whose beard offsets his receding hairline, has worried eyes and the open neediness of someone you’d avoid at that same party.
Like some siblings, the brothers don’t look like each other and scarcely make any sense when they’re together, which slowly feeds the comedy and the pathos of their gently antagonistic relationship. Assayas sketches in that connection with precision and economy, prying open each man’s sensibility — and his attitude toward the other — through their everyday, simple (and less so) actions and freighted talks. Shortly after the movie opens, a box from Amazon arrives for Paul. With cumbersome gloves and flamboyant caution, Paul handles the package as if it were radioactive (a very familiar image for some of us) as his brother watches him with barely contained incredulity. Then Etienne criticizes Paul for ordering from Amazon.
Assayas isn’t interested in idealized types, and he doesn’t overtly take sides here. Instead, he nudges you back and forth between the brothers; it’s not for nothing that some of the characters play tennis. Watching other people fumble, comically or otherwise, in a global catastrophe isn’t inherently inviting. And the beauty and comfort of this refuge can almost feel like a provocation. There are nods to other people’s suffering, true, and at one point Etienne names some musicians who have died during the pandemic, including the singer-songwriter John Prine. In the main, though, this lockdown has the quality of an idyll rather than a grim escape. Birdsong fills the air rather than the distant whine of plane engines. It’s bittersweet.
The most appealing character in “Suspended Time” is Assayas, a hovering offscreen presence who delivers the confessional, gracefully digressive narration. The house is the one that he grew up in — a desk in the movie belonged to his father, an elegant bedroom was his mother’s — and like many childhood homes, it is now a personal museum of sorts. In one soaring interlude, roughly midway through, Assayas begins speaking about himself over images of Paul running in the countryside, an outing that sends the filmmaker down memory lane, as it were. “Young, I couldn’t run,” Assayas says, explaining that he couldn’t properly breathe. “I’ve come to like it,” he says of running. “I’ve found my bearings.” (He did, at least artistically.)
As Paul continues his run, Assayas, in voice-over, maps the circuit he himself now takes during his runs by ticking off specific mileposts — a swing set, a tennis court, a pond — that he repeatedly passes, grounding himself. Soon after, the director cuts to black-and-white shots of a young man running in the same area on the same circuit, which in turn inspires more remembrances. Assayas then toggles between the young runner and a series of still images, speaks about the library where he worked on his master’s thesis, the thinkers he studied, a filmmaker who inspired him, a woman he loved. He speaks about running before driving into Paris and recalls the frost and his breath in the air, moments in time that are gone yet not lost.
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