Olivier Assayas’s new film is a flimsy but elegant autofictional sketch about his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, bubbling up with family members in his childhood home in la France profonde. It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.
Vincent Macaigne plays dishevelled film-maker Paul (very different, surely, from the stylish Assayas), who has come back to the handsome family home of his late parents, staying there with his girlfriend (Nine d’Urso) and communicating with his ex-wife and adored tween daughter on Zoom. He is going to be living there with his brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) a music journalist and his new partner (Nora Hamzawi). Assayas uses what appears to be his actual home and in his opening autobiographical voiceover introduces us to the house and grounds - easily the best part of the film, actually - and in further personal sections dispenses with the fiction and talks about the “Assayas” family.
Etienne is in a position to record radio programmes at home and gets started on a show about music stars who have died of Covid, starting with Dave Greenfield of the Stranglers. (For a second, I was hoping Assayas would break out some choice Stranglers tracks, with Etienne playing air guitar. But sadly no.) Paul has little to do but mooch about the place, musing on ideas for films. Paul’s obsessive anti-Covid cleanliness soon irritates Etienne who annoys Paul with his cooking. But of course there are meals and laughter too.
Nothing illustrates the difference between French and British cinema more than this film. Which Brit director would be allowed to indulge himself or herself with this civilised, cultured musing? And to assume that of course there is a supportive home-turf audience for it? This is a film in which someone sits down and listens to a podcast with Jean Renoir talking about his father Pierre-Auguste Renoir – and it’s really interesting. Well, I’m glad that Assayas is allowed to do it.
• Hors du Temps (Suspended Time) screened at the Berlin film festival.
• This article was amended on 19 February 2024 to correct the names of the two principal characters.
