Suspended Time (2024)

Popular reviews

• 

  low key labeled laborious lethargic lockdown laziness

• 
• 

  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…

• 

  Doesn't feel good at all to speak ill of something that contains a scene which uses Bob Dylan's «Murder Most Foul» as a punchline, but alas...

  Talking to a journalist – via Zoom, of course – the Assayas stand-in at one point remarks that he is well aware of how privileged he is to be able to spend the first COVID lockdown at a cozy country estate that was once owned by his parents.

  But then again, isn't Assayas' real privilege that he continues to be so well-respected that he was able to make a film that is basically nothing more than a dramatized rendering of his very uneventful diary about the early days of COVID?

  Let us therefore use…

• 

  écoutez.... j'ai voulu essayer parce que je fais partie de l'amicale-des-fans-de-Micha-Lescot (nous sommes 7 en France, rejoignez-nous!) et qu'étant moi-même plutôt-assez une bourge j'aurais pu potentiellement adhérer... Mais là, wow, j'ai jamais vu ce level, même dans les carnets de confinement de Leïla Slimani. Ça en devient un fascinant objet sociologique sur une classe qui semble complètement inconsciente de la dimension sociale et héritée de ses goûts, de son habitus, qui n'en fait jamais un objet d'auto-dérision (la seule chose filmée comme caricaturale dans le film est l'hypocondrie, pas le fait qu'il lise ses pléiades de Malraux et joue au tennis). Non mais sérieusement, comment enchaîner les phrases "je remerciais le ciel de m'avoir donné ces arbres à admirer" et…

• 

  Alterna entre digresiones personales y episodios ficticios con naturalidad, retratando con calidez y humor una época de cambios difíciles. Se aprecia la honestidad en su discurso, y sus personajes son entrañables y magnéticos.

• 

  It is clear from their ratings that friends did not like Olivier Assayas’s Covid lockdown film as much as I did and, while it is a trifle rather than one of his best films, I did enjoy hanging out for 105 minutes in this autofiction.  As Covid lockdown experiences go, this was a very physically comfortable one, shot as far as I can tell, in Assayas’s family home where he and his brother grew up.  There is a large house, rambling grounds, including a wood, and the capacity to find spaces where you are not living on top of one another.

  The Assayas character, Paul Berger (Vincent Macaigne) is a filmmaker who is there with his girlfriend, Morgane (Nine d’Urso)…

• 

  Concludes a loose trilogy started by Non Fiction and Bergman Island while forming a neat duet with Nü Irma Vep, by which tokens alone it's not minor. And mostly a delight all its own, with potential faults or outside criticisms part and parcel of its construction. People in lockdown make hay of minor conflicts and excessively speak thoughts aloud? Wasn't me!

  I could write about this playing way more towards docufiction than anybody let on, with a lot of productive tension between Assayas' first-person voiceover and a more omnipotent perspective afforded by this fictionalized rendition, or how the film articulates rather honestly the ways lockdown was a wonderful time to be alive if you just knew how to center your own neuroses and flare-ups — with a nod towards the specifics of a personal life I do much to keep offline — but it's almost Christmas.

• 

  - the details hide the big picture
  -what do you think is the big picture?
  -it's life, existence, time. finally...there is nothing else.

  love in the time of covid-19, where we lost those we loved, but found others yet - be it strangers, or those we always knew, but failed to see before - a worker, a brother, a lover, a child, and especially ourselves.  sometimes life gets in the way of life, and only our darkest moments give us the light we always needed, a chance to reflect on this world we have made. even in the stillness of time, life finds a way to go on - some of us together alone, and some of us alone together.

  david hockney, he said he was 83 years old and that he was going to die. he said that we die because we are born, and he said that the most important thing - it's love.

  10/28/24

• 

  so so so pretentious, bourgeois, disappointing

  a waste of time

  the kind of film you make on your own, show to your parents and friends who pretend to like it

  how narcissistic can you be to make a film like this?

  genuinely don’t understand why this is at the berlinale

• 

  Olivier Assayas has spent large swaths of his diverse career fascinated by the stasis of life, and all the varied forms it takes—from the familial (Summer Hours) to the spiritual (Personal Shopper) to the industrial (Irma Vep). Knowing his preoccupation with the frustrations and beauties that keep us locked into place, it only made sense that the French auteur would one day see fit to tackle stasis from a global perspective; it was never a matter of whether or not he’d make a film called “Suspended Time,” but rather when he’d finally get around to it.

  What possible motivation could Assayas have to finally explore the stagnancy experienced across the totality of modern life? What world event could possibly have…

• 

  During the pandemic, you could go live on Instagram instead of ordering from Amazon. :wink: