Suspended Time (Hors du Temps)

 

Director Olivier Assayas

Assayas on the set with Nine D'Urso

actress Nine D'Urso

Assayas with cast on the red carpet in Berlin

SUSPENDED TIME (Hors du Temps)                      C+                                                       France  (105 mi)  2024  d: Olivier Assayas

I wanted to bring a cinema crew within this very intimate space, which is something that movies hardly do.  I thought it was a way of exposing myself.                                                     —Olivier Assayas

For whatever reason, Assayas takes us back to the early stages of the Covid pandemic in 2020, a period of lockdown when stores and restaurants shuttered, leaving people spending the majority of their time indoors, with the director choosing his own childhood home out in the country, a pastoral retreat in the village of Montabé, a small town nestled in the Chevreuse Valley about an hour’s drive from Paris.  It’s an upscale estate surrounded by verdant gardens and woods, filled with empty spaces to hike and explore, where no one is crowding into their space, recalling the summer idyll movies of Éric Rohmer, who had a profound influence on Assayas, both as a Cahiers du Cinéma writer and filmmaker, acknowledging that “Here, time stands still.”  An introductory narrative monologue is spoken by Assayas himself, adding a literary and novelistic flavor, introducing not only the house and the mostly unseen neighborhood homes who own even larger patches of land, but also two couples who are living together in isolation during lockdown, two brothers Paul, Vincent Macaigne, from Assayas’ Non-Fiction (Doubles Vies) (2018) and the recent made-for-TV IRMA VEPP (2022) adaptation of his earlier film Irma Vep (1996), and younger brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), along with their girlfriends Morgane (Nine d’Urso), a documentary filmmaker and Carole (Nora Hamzawi, also in the made-for-TV IRMA VEPP).  Etienne is a music journalist, radio host, and free-spirited rocker with silver hair and tinted dark glasses that are always worn, while Paul is a cinema journalist and filmmaker, perfectly at home with the stacks of old books on his father’s color-coded bookshelves, conjuring up old memories and ghosts of the past.  The two brothers couldn’t be more different, each having their own distinct personality, as Paul is nervous and uptight about just about everything, believing there are exact cautionary procedures to follow to prevent the spread of Covid into their home, like leaving any arriving packages or groceries outside for at least four hours, scrubbing hands afterwards, while rarely venturing into town, but when he does he always wears a mask, and washes his clothes when returning.  Etienne has a more laid back approach, thinking being sensible is the best policy, but that drives his brother nuts, thinking he’s being too blasé about it.  While neither are at high risk for infection, Paul runs around scared all the time, charting infectious rates like an amateur sleuth, worried that they’ll be infected, while Etienne is more worried about the highly restrictive encroachments on his personal freedom.  As there’s constant friction between them, since they haven’t lived with each other since they were children, they each crave their own space, and this gigantic mansion in the woods allows that, where they only come together at meal times, with Etienne spending plenty of time making fun of his brother’s quirky obsessions, while also pursuing his latest habit of making crêpes all the time.  All happening before a vaccine became available, most of us were more severely traumatized during Covid, especially by the spiraling number of deaths that reached into the millions, than anyone seen here, where the life of entitled privilege insulates them from the more unpleasant realities the rest of us faced on a daily basis, like losing our jobs from so many business closures, or close friends and family members to this protracted outbreak, wiping out entire wings of grandparents in nursing homes, while some also lost their homes.   

More than anything, this is a dialogue-heavy film, to the point of making viewers uncomfortable, as they feel little interest in returning to these burdensome times when Covid dominated the landscape, as it was something you couldn’t escape.  Finally free of the complete Covid saturation, Assayas has re-opened the door, like a portal to a lost and forgotten time, and plunged us right into the middle of it again, with the family home providing a legacy to their parents, becoming a ghostly character in itself that haunts everything we see.  Mostly this takes us back to the perfect French countryside of Assayas’ SUMMER HOURS (2008), where languid sunny days were all too common, as the flora of the area is presented in great detail, a world much better represented by the work of painters, questioning whether cinema has lost touch with nature.  But unlike that film, where the characters are well-defined and easily recognizable, played by major stars, these characters are much less interesting, in fact, there’s little interest in them at all, making this something of a slog.  The story revolves around Paul and his ultra-cautious neurotic obsessions about Covid, even watching a YouTube video on how to wash your hands properly as he washes his hands properly, so it gets a little ridiculous, but worst of all are his constant rants about painters, writers, and the world of art, where he endlessly name drops significant cultural figures, discussing the letters of Héloïse and Peter Abelard and the work of British painter and photographer David Hockney, just for starters.  With French art and literary history constantly being referenced, you may need footnotes to follow this movie, as Assayas mines the interiority of the pandemic in uniquely different ways, but fails to make any of this connect, intellectually or emotionally, as they seemingly have meaning to him and him alone, but he never translates that to viewers, who have largely tuned out.  This is significant, as Assayas is something of an art historian, with Paul becoming an alter-ego of the director, but his fascination never becomes ours, as we are continually locked out from what’s seemingly so essential to his life, as it simply never matters, yet he rambles on and on to the point of being unintelligible and pretentious.  His brother Etienne has already tuned out on almost anything and everything he has to say, knowing there’s no connection there, so he doesn’t waste his time, which is a very sensible approach, yet there we are stuck in the middle of a picture that takes us back to a time we’d just as soon forget, with Paul being at the center of it, offering a refresher course on everything we’d rather not remember.  The names of musicians lost to Covid are mentioned, while also mentioning Bob Dylan’s nearly 17-minute song released at the outset of Covid, Bob Dylan - Murder Most Foul (Official Audio) YouTube (16:56), but their music is never heard, which is unfortunate, as that might have expanded Etienne’s role, instead they play the goofball novelty song Snoopy V.S. The Red Baron -- The Royal Guardsman (2:40), also referenced near the end of Quintin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019).  Cinematographer Éric Gautier captures the mostly empty spaces with a natural light, creating a gentle dreamscape that feels quietly autobiographical.  In real life, Assayas has a younger brother Michka who is a successful music journalist, as well as a daughter whose custody he shares with the now-separated mother, Mia Hansen-Løve (played by Maud Wyler), maker of All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonée) (2007), Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse) (2011), Eden (2014), Things to Come (L'avenir) (2016), Bergman Island (2021), and One Fine Morning (Un Beau Matin) (2022).   

Resembling the bare-bones, small-scale productions made in the early years of Covid, where there are distinct intersections with the director’s own life, yet while there is an attempt to build important autobiographical links, they seem inconsequential, as what instead stands out is the massive scale of the house and surrounding grounds, a picture of luxuriousness, where it’s hard to picture any kind of trauma happening at that locale, as it offers all the privacy in the world.  If you’re going to be stuck in isolation, that’s the place to be, but who among us had that opportunity, as this simply reeks of privilege, yet this mostly seems to be an expression of blasé banality.  Both brothers are recently separated, leaving children behind as part of the collateral damage, speaking to them via Zoom calls, with Paul also conducting video chat sessions with his therapist (Dominique Reymond, the same part she plays in the recent Assayas made-for-TV adaptation of IRMA VEPP, and a regular in earlier Assayas films), rather preposterously taking place in the great outdoors while sitting under a giant tree, comfortably nestled into the natural world.  This is the last place he should feel stressed, and even acknowledges at some point that he actually likes the idea of lockdown, as if he’s on a permanent vacation of reading and relaxation, allowing him to revisit literature he previously had no time for, claiming it feels almost utopian despite happening in the face of millions dying from a social catastrophe, and even throws in a podcast with Jean Renoir talking about his father Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  But rather than expand on that, the film instead follows the constant bickering between the two brothers, squabbling over health protocols, living a hermetic lifestyle that produces an incessant need for online shopping, where the moral justification only places more money into the coffers of billionaires who show a blatant disregard for the company’s appalling working conditions, with Etienne calling Amazon “a war profiteer,” while blindly forgetting the women in their lives, who are present, but rarely make any meaningful decisions, and instead remain almost entirely in the background.  Plainly speaking, this is one of the weaker Assayas efforts, weaving together pieces of a confinement movie, where the repetitive nature accentuates the claustrophobic feel of the world closing in on them in the form of an ever-spreading, highly infectious killer disease, like some schlock B-movie exploitation horror flick from the 50’s, while characters try to make sense of the cramped, routine existence that they inhabit that resembles the imprisoned doom of Sartre’s No Exit.  While hardly on the same level of other Covid-restrictions movies that would have to include the imaginative flair of Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeala cu bucluc sau porno balamuc) (2021), the playfulness of Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Tsugua Diaries (Diários de Otsoga) (2021), the unraveling relationships of Claire Denis’ Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement) (2022) or the noirish ambiguity of Stars at Noon (2022), and the wild turns in Joachim Trier’s hypnotically beautiful 2021 #3 Film of the Year The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske), the Covid experience remains deeply imprinted into our minds and imaginations, yet here self-indulgence and monotony seem to go hand in hand, where the circular monologues feel endlessly exhausting, but a final gesture of love in the air in the middle of an overgrown enchanted forest of Paul’s youth seems like an idyllic hope for a brighter future.  

Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad)

 

Director Albert Serra

AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (Tardes de soledad)                     B+                                Spain  France  Portugal  (125 mi)  2024  d: Albert Serra

The bullfighter was bent with the bull, he cimbred his waist on the exquisite brushstroke of the right, embarked the natural with velvet caress.  And the helper.  And the chest pass in amalgam of depth and art.  And the serenity of holding a break with the pythons in centimeters of the thighs.  And the knee on the ground to screw the bull in follow-up of the deception.  And the crutch on the left again for the natural deep.  And the trench again.  And the quiquiriquí.  And the signing pass.  And scarlet flame in change of hand.  And the bull returned to deceit, seized on his flights.  Harmony, cadence, bewitchment.                                                                          —Joaquín Vidal, Spanish journalist treating bullfighting not just as a spectacle, but as a fleeting art form to be described with intense sensory detail

Any way you want to look at it, this film is shocking in every respect, yet filmed with an unflinching eye by Catalan cinematographer Artur Tort, who also co-edits the film with the director, using three outstanding cameras and magnificent sound equipment, where the overall work is so much more impressive than in his subsequent work in Lav Diaz’s Magellan (Magalhães) (2025), and despite the devastatingly horrific nature of some of what we see, it’s presented with unmistakable elegance, brutal and poetic at the same time, begging the question, is it art or is it barbarism?  A formally minimalistic, documentary portrait of the legendary twenty-nine year old, still-active Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey (Home - Web oficial del torero Andrés Roca Rey), the equivalent of Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo in the soccer world, this is the director’s first nonfiction film, listed at #1 from Cahiers du Cinéma: Top 10 Films of 2025, #6 from Film Comment: Best Films of 2025, and #6 from Richard Brody: New Yorker: The Best Films of 2025, and winner of the Golden Seashell for top prize at Spain’s 2024 San Sebastián Film Festival.  It’s a film about archaic rituals and tradition, about the people who know a lot about it, and are the specialists in their field.  The ornate and colorful style may remind viewers of Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador (1987), where Roca Rey is considered the world’s most famous matador, as the film immerses itself in the old-fashioned world of the bull ring, pitting one man alone against the immense power of a bull, where it’s a battle to the death, though the odds are stacked against the animal, bloodied by a series of lances into the spine or shoulders prior to the final few passes, eventually falling to their deaths, exposing the brutality of the sport, which is why bullfighting is illegal in most countries with the exception of specific regions of Spain, Portugal, France, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador, where it is viewed as an essential, historic cultural event, appealing more to those on the right wing, who view male virility and macho tradition as a form of nationalist expression.  No argument is made here, making no overt comment about bullfighting, with no talking heads promoting any of the various points of view, instead it is a pure cinematic exhibition playing out onscreen as it happens inside the ring, where you can hear but never see the crowd, using a repetitive style that allows viewers to enter the near hypnotic relationship between the matador and the bull, where the emphasis is on the developing psychological standoff, relying upon skill and agility in his maneuvers and his elegant use of the cape, typically killing the animal with a single sword-thrust that leads to its collapse.  The danger to the matador is equally intense, as bulls occasionally gore them, or flip them upside down, with the opportunity to stomp them to death, or pierce their hearts or lungs, even subjecting their faces to their horns, and while never mentioned in the film, there are famous matadors who died in the ring, one during a live television broadcast in Spain, Víctor Barrio, a 29-year old Spanish matador who was killed in 2016 when a bull’s horn pierced his chest in front of live spectators, dying just a few minutes later.  Balancing the graceful choreography with the brutality, exposing an extremely stylized ritual, and the insane courage that someone must have to stand face-to-face with such a massively powerful animal, this is a movie about looking death in the eye, knowing the risks, yet exposing themselves anyway while defying the possibility of dying.  When Roca Rey is badly injured by a bull, his first reflex is not to look for a doctor, but to go back into the arena bleeding hard to become victorious against that same bull in front of a delirious crowd.  Tradition and performance, also history and the present are so directly interwoven into the film, where the very different reactions indicate that Serra has in fact found the right balance, neither a clear glorification nor a strong condemnation, rather somewhere in the middle, offering an invitation to reflection.

In a sport loved by Hemingway, Picasso, Dalí, Goya, Lorca, Gustave Doré, and Manet, recalling Hemingway’s 263-page 1932 essay Ernest Hemingway DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON (pdf), which likely influenced the title, all seeing the beauty, tragedy, and even mysticism in it, the film offers no history or backstory, but simply places us inside the spectacle of the ring, exposing the ceremonial splendor and devastating brutality from extremely close range, where the camerawork is simply outstanding, offering astonishing views of such a controversial sport, as we hear the groaning sounds of the matador encouraging the bull, and the exhaustive snorts of the animal, elevating what we see to performance art.  This sport goes back to Roman gladiator entertainment when slaves were forced to battle wild animals in a Colosseum ring surrounded by a hyped up and frenzied crowd, while bullfighting in Spain goes back to the 8th century, going through various iterations of banishment and public performance, revived in the 18th century, where Seville has been credited with founding modern Spanish-style bullfighting.  The great Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura made his feature movie debut in a film centered around bullfighting, LOS GOLFOS (The Delinquents) (1960), the first Spanish movie filmed entirely on location, while Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi made THE MOMENT OF TRUTH (1965), an equally compelling elegy to a great bullfighter.  Remaining controversial throughout the centuries, most would probably find the sport abhorrent, where killing an animal for sport is the Spanish working class equivalent to the aristocratic tradition of British fox-hunting on horseback, or the pheasant and rabbit hunting seen in Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), with hounds chasing after them until the animal is shot, effectively becoming a symbol of the callousness, moral decay, and frivolous nature of the upper class, while also paralleling the slaughter of the coming war (WWI).  But this is much more bloody and brutal, featuring massive animals weighing over 1000 pounds literally dripping with blood, where it can be seen as grotesque, but that’s where the aesthetic artistry of the filmmaker gives this a different sense, as it’s unflinchingly visceral, seductive and distancing at the same time, almost like a religious experience, a glimpse of the sacred and the profane, or a transcendent search for the sublime, always shown with a painterly gaze.  Seen through the eyes of the bullfighter, with his unusual posture, extravagant poses and facial expressions, where it’s all about agility, rhythm, and timing, much like a ballet dancer, we also hear the sounds of the spectacle, accentuating the intimate language between the matador and the bull, as well as the encouraging cries of his handlers nearby, who are themselves lesser-scale matadors and can be heard in a running dialogue contemptuously insulting the bull, using the most profane language, while also heaping the most effusive praise to the matador.  We hear the aura that still permeates around the figure of the bullfighter, as we follow his charismatic presence to his limousine, hotel room, and dressing room, exposing his many behind-the-scenes rituals, drinking water out of a silver cup on the sidelines that no one else touches, always surrounded by an exclusively male support staff, where he’s treated like a rock star.  Mostly eliminating the introductory ceremonial splendor of the processional sounds of the trumpets before entering the ring, instead Serra pays particular attention to the moments just before the death of the animal, who by this time is physically exhausted, where the camera just lingers, as the matador exhibits fearlessness and showmanship by turning his back to the animal to recognize the audience with a salute, literally standing just a few feet in front of the animal, then turning with the red cape behind him, the object the bull is charging, taking so many risks, but it’s all part of the operatic spectacle in this macabre dance of death.  The closeness the matador comes to the animal is nothing less than shocking, which is part of what makes this film so uniquely compelling.     

Filmed in the grandest arenas of Madrid, Seville, and Bilbao, where the sport is currently in freefall in Spain, with the number of fights cut in half in the last 20 years in a trend that is only continuing, essentially abolished in Catalonia where no fights have occurred since 2011.  In Barcelona, a cinema within a shopping center lies at the exact spot where one of its three bullrings once existed.  The Catalan filmmaker is a graduate of the University of Barcelona, whose style relies upon the acute powers of observation, where there are definitely a few moments in this film that are staggeringly difficult to watch, as the barbarous nature of how the animal is treated—and filmed—is openly on display, where the blood never stops flowing, literally becoming a ritualistic sacrifice and public spectacle, where especially chilling are those close-ups just after the animal has fallen, often going through convulsive twitches, as we literally see him put to death with a knife directly into the skull, severing his spinal cord while writhing in agony, as ropes are attached to the horns before he gets dragged out of the ring by a team of horses.  This is not for the faint of heart, completely defying conventional wisdom, as animals are definitely harmed in the making of this film, which is rarely seen anymore.  That, by itself, is grotesque, but that is not all we see, where you have to put the entire film in context, revolving more around the psychological mindset of the matador, including the rituals in preparation for the battle, crossing himself three times before he puts on his jacket, humbly kissing the rosary chain with the cross, addressing many prayers to God and the Virgin, while kissing a weeping Madonna portrait, but above all he exudes calmness and seclusion, never allowing us into his world of single-minded focus, accentuating his ability to read the bulls, knowing about them in great detail, including who their breeders are.  What stands out is his extraordinary concentration, as he has to please the crowd by making it a good fight to the finish, where despite the massive loss of blood, these bulls amazingly keep charging and never seem to give up, as they are bred and trained for this unique moment.  The title does say it all, as in the ring, while there are plenty of others around to distract the animal when necessary, it’s all about the bravery of one man alone, where he has to accentuate that fearlessness by coming so close to death himself, always viewed with elegance and grace, while at the same time the camera brings viewers closer than they could ever be in real life, a directness that only cinema can produce.  That’s the mesmerizing aspect of this, as it simply takes us where no one else has ever been.  As if to counterbalance the violence of what happens in the ring, there is a score by Barcelona-based composer Marc Verdaguer, but it’s heavily overshadowed by the calming elegance of the Valse Triste by Sibelius, Jean Sibelius, Valse Triste (orch.Herbert von Karajan) YouTube (6:21), which just sounds otherworldly in this environment, yet the pièce de résistance is the Jefferson Airplane from 1967, specifically guitarist Jorma Kaukonen’s solo piece Embryonic Journey YouTube (1:52), which plays as he’s getting dressed against a white backdrop in that tightly fitting, heavily embroidered, brightly colorful and extravagantly decorative, sequined costume, which is its own ritual, looking like something Goya might have painted.  Roca Rey has his own brushes with death, getting gored on one occasion, getting pinned against the boards in another, and nearly mauled, but he escapes with his life, saved by the quick actions of his team, where you wonder if this film would have been made if he hadn’t survived, where we’re left with this ominous feeling that something could always happen inside the ring.  So in a sense this is a snuff film, much like many National Geographic television episodes that routinely show animal killings in the wild, revealing the catastrophes of nature, but this accentuates the psychological interplay between the immense size of the bull and a lone matador who puts his life on the line every time he enters the ring.  Yes, it’s all stacked in his favor, and it’s a cruel exhibition, but there’s also extraordinary beauty to be found, where that stunning aspect alone is the highlight of this film.       

Note

In 2015-16, at the age of twenty, Andrés Roca Rey was listed as the worst matador of all time by the British tabloid The Sun, earning a reputation early in his career for an intense, high-risk style that resulted in a remarkable number of serious injuries and high-profile gorings.  In each of his first five bullfights, he was gored five times, with multiple, rapid-succession injuries including losing two teeth after a bull hit him in the mouth, while the next time his jaw shattered, suffering another goring in the mouth, and then sustaining a 10cm-long injury in the buttock region with a severed abdominal muscle, as he was catapulted into the air and transported to the hospital.  However, this only trajected him into eternal fame, as Roca Rey would later fight hundreds more bulls, and today he is known as the only matador who can fill Spanish stadiums on his own.  Capturing him at the peak of his powers is like filming Messi or Michael Jordan at the apex of their careers.