“Behind the intensity and intellect of Assayas there is clearly someone who is ready to laugh at himself, and take the audience along on that ride.”

Undoubtedly, the worldwide pandemic of 2020 either made us bitter or made us better, to paraphrase the old American saying. In the case of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, it obviously made him better. His latest film Hors du temps (Suspended Time) is at once funny, poignant and incredibly important, and arguably his most intimate and personal. The film tells the simple enough story of two brothers spending lockdown in their childhood home, along with their girlfriends. While the place is idyllic, the situation is far from it; going back to how we felt in the spring of 2020, there was an overwhelming anxiety of not knowing where and how it would all end. Was COVID a deadly virus? If we caught it, would we end up having long-lasting, life-threatening side effects? How could we best protect ourselves and our loved ones? Would the world ever re-open again and go back to normal, and what would that new normal be? In retrospect, and because the human spirit is so wonderfully resilient, we can chuckle about some of the situations that Assayas so brilliantly illustrates in Hors du temps, but back then, these were dreadful times.

Filmmaker Paul, played by returning Assayas collaborator Vincent Macaigne, and music journalist Etienne (film and TV actor Micha Lescot) are two brothers who are as different in looks as they are in character. One pudgy and funny, though not always meaning to be, and the other lanky and intense, they argue about everything — as brothers usually do. They fight about how to pack up the glass recycling, whether to toss or clean a burnt saucepan and, crucially, how to maintain the safety of the household through lockdown. Paul is uptight, Etienne seems less so, but their roles and characters switch often; perhaps because both, paired and put together, make up the complexity of one man: their creator Olivier Assayas.

In his director’s notes in the film’s press kit, Assayas admits that while writing Hors du temps he felt “like I was sketching on the spot to keep a record of what I had experienced, and perhaps also to give meaning to this moment of immobility.” And while there have been a few films that tackled the pandemic and lockdowns around the world, none has delved into the human sacrifices and rewards of COVID in quite the same way. This is a spiritual film about what we learned while being confined to the same space for months on end, and how those lessons should be invaluable for our future. But of course, looking at world politics today, those lessons seem to have already been forgotten.

Throughout the film, a voiceover talks us through Assayas’ own story and his family’s history. The voice tells of his Italian grandfather, of his elegant Hungarian mother, and describes the family home in Montabé in Boullay-lès-Troux just outside of Paris, the location where the film was shot. This reality is always mixed with fiction, because even the voice we believe to belong to the filmmaker turns out to be that of an actor when the credits roll.

Assayas’ intent is to play with pushing the boundaries in Hors du temps and he admittedly explores how to be a cinematic David Hockney, the English painter he deeply admires. Yet Assayas is already to cinema what Hockney is to art, someone who straddles comfortably the line that separates reality, or figurative art, from fictional narrative, or modern and abstract art. Like Hockney is the master of this approach in art, Assayas is its master in cinema. And like Hockney in his whimsical lockdown work ‘A Year in Normandie’, don’t go thinking that Assayas is trying to outsmart us all — as the uproariously laugh-out-loud moments in Hors du temps, as well as casting Macaigne as the filmmaker’s unlikely alter ego clearly show. Behind the intensity and intellect of Assayas there is clearly someone who is ready to laugh at himself, and take the audience along on that ride.

Image copyright: Carole Bethuel