In his latest film which in English gets the title ‘Suspended Time’, the French maestro gets super personal and in the process, makes us discover the laughter and joie de vivre we lost during the recent COVID times.

Few directors can reinvent their style with each film they make. And change cinema for the audience in the process. I can name a handful, at most, and among these men and women Olivier Assayas has a special place of honor. From Personal Shopper to Non Fiction, nothing stayed the same. And that goes for Irma Vep, the film, to Irma Vep the series and through to Wasp Network. If you think you’ve figured out Assayas’s style, he changes it on you just in time to leave you baffled and deliciously entertained.

At this year’s Berlinale, Assayas presented his latest, Hors du temps in Competition. The title, which roughly translates to “out of time”, in English gets renamed Suspended Time. However you wish to call this project, it is the French filmmaker’s most personal, and that’s saying a lot for a writer and director who willingly and quickly admits “all my movies are autobiographical, in a way or another,” when asked.

The story revolves around two brothers and their girlfriends, spending COVID lockdown in a country house together. Every little glitch and idiosyncrasy that we experienced during the same uncertain times, Paul and Etienne, the brothers, come up against as well. Only in Assayas’s film, the gravity of the moment becomes watchable, and it is constantly suspended by anecdotes and remembrances of things past in the filmmaker’s life and family history.

Hors du temps possesses a superpower as a work of the seventh art. It allows us to laugh at a time which wasn’t so long ago, when we obsessed over a microscopic virus which seemed to have taken over the world and our subconscious. It is this superpower that makes Assayas’s latest film so powerful. And in my opinion, a nearly perfect film — actually make that the perfect film for me.

When asked if this is the most personal film he has ever made, the understatedly elegant Assayas says, “yes, yes it is.” He then takes a long time to come up with the next words, uttered in his alluring, French-accented speaking voice. “And at the same time it’s not a movie I wanted, it is kind of a movie that happened to me.” Prodded further, he explains “OK, it’s lockdown, the world is at a standstill, I have no idea what my next film is going to be. I am kind of working on a project that became the Irma Vep series. I had just finished making a movie that was complex and ambitious, which was Wasp Network [2019] which I shot in Cuba and involved very complex logistics. It had just opened, it did OK. That was behind me. “ And then the pandemic shut everything down.

The world was on hold, also for Assayas who admits, “I was supposed to direct an opera that was canceled. And A24 [the independent entertainment company] in the US wanted to develop a series with me based on my film Irma Vep, which I’d done 10 years before for no money, and in 20 days. And they wanted to make something much bigger with it. So I wrote a pilot, I wrote a bible, I was in a panic because I’m some sort of germophobe, sadly for me, and so it was both a moment of creation and being frightened, but also of reconnecting with nature, reconnecting with my brother, reconnecting with childhood. I mean, I had a lot of very complex emotions I had to process.”

Retired away in the countryside near Paris, inside a beautiful house with a surrounding garden, Assayas is the first to admit that “for some reason I had been extremely privileged, because I had a house where I could retreat, you know some kind of desert island in the middle of the storm, and I never had COVID, I didn’t catch it.” Yet he did get a strange fever, over 104F, for over a week and that made him reassess things. As he puts it, “a million deaths and ultimately, it was something else, nothing to do with [COVID]. It was benign, but during that week I thought I was sick. I didn’t understand why and I was sitting in the garden, trying to do something to, you know, survive.” And writing came natural to keep busy, “I thought, let’s see what happens if I write sketches of what I went through, what has been happening to me these last few months.”

The result was autobiographical, “something that could have been a book,” as Assayas points out, “I mean, when I started writing, I thought that I was writing a small book about reminiscences in my childhood.” It was then that Assayas “realized the past that was coming up in the process of writing was something that could be visual. And maybe I could capture, instead of just imagining something the way I have been functioning, the way I had been writing fiction, working on my previous films.” This included using “the actual locations, my genuine memories instead of transforming them again,” according to Assayas, “and once I had finished, it was not long enough for a book, it was too short, it was not a movie yet, so I thought let’s see what happens if I try to connect the present.” The project was set aside for a bit, until the filmmaker picked it up again and started working on the film itself. The rest is cinematic magic.

Hors du temps isn’t just autobiographical, it is also filmed inside Assayas’s actual childhood home, the place where he and his brother spent their lockdown months. In fact, his brother Michka, when given the script by Assayas to approve, suggested the two of them could play the roles of Paul and Etienne — themselves. To which the filmmaker replied “I’m not ready for that!” And Vincent Macaigne and Micha Lescot came in instead, Macaigne a frequent collaborator of Assayas lately, tapped to play his alter ego in films.

So did allowing cameras inside his home feel a bit like too much intimacy shared for Assayas, I ask him. “Yes, it did,” he says, continuing “it did because there is something that kind of embarrassed me a bit — I mean I kind of shied away from it.” As he points out, “all my movies are autobiographical, in a way or another, anybody who writes a novel is dealing part in fiction and part with his own experience of the world. So there is nothing special about this — all writers and all filmmakers function this way.” Yet Assayas wanted to push the boundaries, reinvent cinema as I put it, and he “was interested in how far I could go in that process. And why not go all the way — why not? Instead of transforming things, adapting things, putting stuff under the rug or whatever. What if I’m completely transparent, what if I just dare to do that? What if I challenge myself to do that? And it was in a way about challenging myself, because I’ve been saying so much that what I was doing was autobiographical, knowing that ultimately I was not putting the whole pieces of the jigsaw on the table. What would happen if I put all the pieces of the jigsaw on the table?”

Did he feel released after putting all his cards, or the jigsaw pieces, on the table for his audience? “I don’t know yet,” he confesses, “I will tell you when a little more time has passed and see if I go back to that house or not, if I use it or not, and if I make another movie in that vein or not. But ultimately, I think I needed to make it.” This one. And I’m glad he did. It is always interesting to me when critics I speak to say “Assayas is showing us how smart he is with this film,” as a sort of putdown. Having met and interviewed him twice now, I can vouch that the intelligence part comes with the territory with Assayas. He’s not trying to prove anything, it’s simply up to the rest of us to rise to the occasion, and tap into our inner smart.

About his alter ego Macaigne, Assayas admits, “this is the third movie we have done together. I met him when I was doing Non Fiction, a few years ago [2018] and I just love him. Because he manages to move in a way that is seamless, between comedy and sometimes even slapstick, and emotion — more profound and genuine emotions. Vincent is a director himself, he’s a very famous stage director. Brilliant, so he’s not just an actor.”

Assayas is also very generous with his actors, unlike many directors who mistrust sharing the creative process with them. “I always share the creation of my films with my actors,” he admits, “and so I give them a lot of space.” With the autobiographical elements, he says “obviously once the actors take over, you lose some of the autobiographical dimension — the actors become more important than whatever you have written.” In this case, Assayas continues “there is a layer that doesn’t move, it stays completely autobiographical, that’s what I narrate with the voiceover. Whatever is happening when the actors are around, what happens between them belongs to them, in a certain way.”

He points to his extraordinary cast, comprised of “Vincent Macaigne and Nora Hamzawi [who] have been my accomplices in the last three movies,” and also “Micha Lescot and Nine D’Urso [who] are new, but I’ve known them for a while and I admire and love them very much. So all of them brought something of their own identity, or their own singularity,” to the film.

Hors du temps, with the word time featured in the title, has a lot to do with our personal relationship with the concept of time. And Assayas admits that “time is important in our lives — how we deal with it, what we do with our time, and how we deal with the way it passes. This movie is both about how unwillingly I had to reconnect with my own past, where I rediscovered part of myself which I thought I had completely left behind.” When asked if this is his “Proustian” film, Assayas laughs and answers “it’s my Proustian film! Very modest, very modest…”

When asked if cinema as an industry has changed because of the pandemic, Assayas chimes in quickly “not enough for my taste — it could have changed more.” Personally, Assayas finds his own style changed by the pandemic and offers his last two projects, including the series Irma Vep, as examples. “Now it feels pretty much as business as usual,” he says about his own cinema in relation to the system, which “doesn’t feel that different from how it was before the pandemic. I’ll keep trying to make movies that are as disruptive as possible. But that’s what I’ve always done in one way or another.”

I’d use iconoclastic, but disruptive works too, as a definition of Assayas’ special brand of cinema.

Did the film prove a sort of therapy for Assayas? “It was important for me to do it so I could feel I had managed to do something with the lost time of the pandemic,” but, he continues, “in terms of me overcoming my paranoia — terribly unsuccessful.”

He continues, “sometimes there's a sense that you create art as a therapy to overcome something or because it gives you some kind of relief, but ultimately, I think it's about scratching wounds.” Yet we, the audience, felt good about laughing at something which felt so hopeless in the moment. For me, it felt wonderfully therapeutic and I tell Assayas. “In that sense, yes, and even for me it’s a way of exorcising it — not to experience lockdown as horror, disaster but as if in a scary concept, I could find my own answers.”

For a review of the film, check out ICSFilm.org.

Images courtesy of the Berlinale, used with permission.