SUSPENDED TIME - Mark Reviews Movies

Suspended Time, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 14, 2025

To watch writer/director Olivier Assayas' Suspended Time is to be reminded of life during the shelter-in-place orders of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main takeaway of this movie is that the filmmaker seems to miss those days.

Why wouldn't he? The movie, which is both decidedly autobiographical and completely fictional, is set and was filmed at Assayas' childhood home, which is a fairly lovely one in the French countryside, neighboring an even larger estate that is also fair game for the characters in this story. With so much to enjoy and such little reason to worry about the deadly disease that's ravaging cities like the one the characters left when the lockdown orders began, these people get to do so much that most others could only have dreamt of during that period.

Surely, Assayas is wiser than this self-indulgent little movie. It's fine enough, perhaps, as a comedy about mismatched people being confined together under circumstances in which the close proximity brings out old and new reasons to resent each other. As for replicating the experience of either lockdown or the pandemic itself, the movie exists in the same sort of privileged bubble as its characters do.

The Assayas stand-in the dramatized story is a filmmaker named Paul (Vincent Macaigne). Paul is frightened of catching COVID and follows all of the suggestions or guidelines being published by scientists or enacted by the government. Whenever a package arrives from the online shopping site that he now depends upon, he opens it while wearing a mask and gloves, puts the item aside, and throws the box outside to ensure that no stray contaminant enter his clean, regularly disinfected space.

All of this increasingly irritates Paul's younger brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), a rock-music journalist who'd like a little bit of freedom every now and again, but with local businesses apart from grocery stores closed, he doesn't have many, if any, options. Instead, he just has sit around watching his brother buy from a retailer that he considers incredibly immoral, listening as Paul keeps reminding him about all of the rules and recommendations put out there, and making crepes for himself, because he has become quite skilled at cooking that bit of comfort food.

Their dynamic is fairly amusing, but the movie really isn't about that. Also with the brothers in the country house are their current partners. Paul, who's divorced and has a daughter living with his ex-wife, was dating Morgane (Nine D'Urso) when the pandemic began, and they decided to shelter in place together. Meanwhile, Etienne is married to Carole (Nora Hamzawi), but the movie isn't really about how these romantic relationships develop, struggle, or mean much of anything during the crisis, either.

What is it about, then? Well, the dramatization is simply a slice-of-life story about what these four get up to while in lockdown. Paul reads or, at least, pretends to, in order to sound smart when journalists interview him about the changing landscape of making and watching movies during a pandemic—if either is even possible or a good idea at the time.

Meanwhile, Etienne, who hosts a radio show about the history of rock music, gets some broadcasting equipment sent to the house, and he has to jury-rig a setup that will allow him to return to doing a show live. The women are there, too, mainly so that Paul has another outlet to espouse his ideas about art.

The more interesting thing, perhaps, for people who care about filmmaking and filmmakers is that Assayas himself provides narration to the story. He ignores the fact that his screenplay is a work of fiction and speaks of his own experiences—both in terms of personal history and professional anecdotes—in between scenes. From that, we have to assume most of what's on screen is as autobiographical about his time during lockdown as the narration, and one can almost feel the filmmaker's efforts to make this intentionally aimless seem relevant by way of his voice-over.

At times, both Paul and Assayas' voice talk about finding new ways to make movies, ideally by returning to nature, which served as inspiration to countless artists centuries before the medium of film was even a thought. There are some admittedly beautiful moments of the countryside here, as well as thoughtful considerations of the past and memory, but if the filmmaker wants to spark some kind of revolution, that must be on his to-do list for later.

Of course, that might be the joke of Suspended Time, which also has Paul speaking about what he hoped would be the result of the pandemic and shelter-in-place orders. Instead of real change, everything looks as if it's going back to previously normal mundanity, and if the mundaneness of this movie is the gag, it's even less insightful than the rest of it.

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