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.  

Enys Men

Director Mark Jenkin

ENYS MEN               B+                                                                                                            Great Britain  (96 mi)  2022  d: Mark Jenkin

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare.  Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it.  The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.                                                                  —Joan Didion from The Paris Review, 1978

A metaphysical horror flick with Nicolas Roeg sensibilities, including the intrusion of the natural world in Walkabout (1971) and the recurring red coat image from Don't Look Now (1973), yet also in the editing, with its free-associative cross-cutting in time and space, where the bleak remoteness recalls Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937), with a minimalist yet repeating narrative that resembles the carefully choreographed, almost mathematically precise shooting scheme of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), yet also delves into ghostly realms.  This is one of the better efforts of using the COVID lockdown as a metaphor, shot during the pandemic, where isolation is a recurrent theme as we follow an anonymous middle-aged woman known only as a wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine, the director’s partner), the sole resident living alone on an island off the Cornish coast, instead spending her time hiking around the island in her hiking boots, studying and collecting data on a rare flower growing on the cliffs, making scientific entries into a daily journal, where at least initially not much changes as we see her making a cup of tea while listening to the scratchy sounds of a shortwave radio broadcast and/or a two-way radio.  The grind of the routine is all that matters, with the director establishing a rhythm and unpretentious avant-garde aesthetic where not much happens, providing no clear answers by the end, with very little human interaction, as it’s all about capturing the minute details of daily living in such an isolated existence, an exploration of time, memory, nature, and grief, expressed with a sense of dread and foreboding, where it’s not really horror per se, but a cinematic aesthetic.  Like the Dogma tradition, The 10 Rules of "Dogme 95", The Danish Film Movement, on Christmas Day 2012 Jenkin typed out his Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 film manifesto, checkthis.com/sldg13, consisting of 13 rules promoting his own film aesthetic, “to be realised with a minimum of fuss.”  Rules, of course, that are later meant to be broken!  In something of a one-man project, the film is written, directed, shot, and edited, with a post synchronized sound design and ambient musical score written by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, shot on 16mm using highly saturated color on aged film stock, using an outdated, wind-up Bolex camera that allows only 27 seconds per shot, where the authentic look of the film includes recurring dirt scratches and light flare-ups around the grainy edges of the frame, yet there’s an intoxicating style to the repetitious visual design of the film that is not like anything you typically see, featuring a prominent and almost playful use of a zoom lens, feeling more like an immersive viewer experience.  Jenkin’s earlier film BAIT (2019), winner of the Outstanding Debut while nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year at the British Bafta Film Awards in 2020 that ultimately became the most successful Cornish film ever made, had a silent film era look and was also shot in a picturesque Cornish fishing village, part of England’s rugged southwestern tip where the coast is lined with towering cliffs overlooking the Celtic Sea.  Though language is sparse, occasionally heard over the radio or in carefully chosen songs, the emphasis is much like Colm Bairéad’s use of Gaelic in The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) (2022), as there is an intentional choice to infuse the film with a thematic song written in an unsubtitled Cornish Celtic language, where a hidden history and culture are resurrected in spirit, actually reviving a Cornwall heritage that once thrived, but has now fallen on hard times, becoming part of the heart and soul of the film.      

Very much focused upon texture, where the medium of film itself becomes woven into the director’s experimental artistic aesthetic, Jenkin’s film premiered in Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where the title (pronounced ‘Ennis Main’) is Cornish for “Stone Island,” taking place on a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and crumbling stone ruins, where her overgrown stone home appears to be the only surviving structure.  Her sense of isolation is magnified immensely by the surrounding quiet, providing a sense of timelessness, where the first spoken word comes about fifteen minutes into a film that features only a dozen or so lines of dialogue spoken throughout the whole experience.  From the journal entries we can tell this is set in 1973, where the film is built around the woman’s same schedule as she gets up in the morning, hikes around the island, looks at the flowers, takes the soil temperature, sees birds flying out over the open sea, drops a rock down an old mining shaft listening for the sound, and observes any changes of note before cranking up the generator to provide electricity in the old cottage where she is living, typically writing “no changes” in her journal, where the endless repetitive cycle resembles the onset of cabin fever in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), as once things start to change, her mental outlook slowly deteriorates, with the director developing a strange fascination for filming backwards.  A younger girl (Flo Crowe) begins to appear in the house with her, a ghostly presence that also appears standing on the roof, but she also speaks to her in a motherly manner, though she may be a younger version of herself that simply appears to her, as if she’s seeing things in her imagination that spring from her own personal memories.  Viewers don’t know how long she’s been alone on this island, or how long she’s staying, as she’s running out of supplies, but apparently is expecting to be replenished by a supply boat, as she’s connected to the outside world by a CB radio, often ignoring the voices heard.  Ambiguous to the core, not really part of any pre-existing genre (though the director drew heavily from British horror films of the 70’s, occasionally resorting to schlock horror techniques), one of the first signs that her world is falling apart is an image of the boatman (Edward Rowe), who suddenly appears on this island, and may be her husband, but disappears just as quickly, like a repressed memory, seeing just a brief flash of the man’s face.  Equally stunning is the appearance of local schoolchildren dancing and singing folk songs outside her cottage, resembling a May Day ceremony, remnants of a vanished community, singing a specially commissioned Kernewek Kemmyn song Kan Me - YouTube (4:09) written and performed again over the end credits by Gwenno, a Welsh singer raised by a Welsh activist mother and a Cornish poet father, who has become something of a one-woman Celtic revival.  This song recurs several times throughout the film, providing an atmospheric refrain, where the haunting nature echoes a theme of internal pain and loss, adding yet another layer of texture, as the line between what’s real and what’s imagined becomes more blurred, taking a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing her, along with viewers, to question the nature of what is real and what is a developing nightmare.

The cawing sounds of seagulls and gannets comprise much of the film’s sound design and visual palette, as these birds were here long before the presence of humans, living in complete harmony with nature, seen dive bombing into the sea for fish, developing a miraculous instinct for survival even in the most remote places.  The camera seems as much interested in the island itself as the woman, perhaps merging into a single consciousness, continually alternating between long takes and sudden cuts that keep viewers off balance.  In an ironic twist, the woman can be seen reading Robert Allen and Edward Goldsmith’s A Blueprint for Survival each night before bed, one of the earliest warnings of climate change in 1972, a telling sign of her own fragile state of mind, offering precious insight into the tenuous state of her well-being and shifting equilibrium, as if her own survival is at stake.  There is a nautical theme of shipwrecks, with a memorial plaque on the island for seafarers lost at sea attempting to save a supply boat in 1897, as emergency warning sounds can be heard over the radio as if it was happening in the present, where she appears to get lost in a time warp, Enys Men | Exclusive Clip | Opens Friday - YouTube (1:15), diving ever deeper into the darkest corners of the unknown, Clip: Enys Men (NEON) - YouTube  (1:18).  She also hears inexplicable sounds in the middle of the night, like water dripping, or pounding sounds underneath the earth, where she moves to explore the origin only to discover the dirty faces of tin miners illuminated by candlelight in a dripping-wet cave, men who may have lost their lives there many years ago, while an elderly preacher (John Woodvine, Mary’s father, ninety-one years old at the time) delivers apocalyptic warnings of lost faith, heard singing a healing hymn, Let the Lower Lights Be Burning - YouTube (2:46), all adding to the spectral figures connected to the island’s history who make themselves known, remnants of a time long passed, mysteriously merging together the past, present, and future.  An ancient stone monolith that has been there all along (the Boswens Menhir, standing more than eight feet tall, Boswens Menhir – ancient history, mystery and modern ...), a memorial to those lost but not forgotten, suddenly changes positions on the familiar landscape, moving closer to the home, while the flowers have also disappeared, alerting viewers that something drastic is happening, perhaps losing all sense of self, 'Enys Men' Clip - Haunting Artifact a Catalyst to ... - YouTube (1:34).  Mysterious sounds are the connecting tissue of this unsettling film, taking us into unexplored realms, like the eerie electronic musical score, the rustling wind, or the waves ceaselessly pounding the craggy rocks along the shoreline, creating a symphony of sounds that mirror her alarming deterioration, where her journal entries warn us of significant changes, as reality starts to break down, suddenly contaminated by the surrounding world, where each passing day sends her deeper into her own darkness, plunging us into the world of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968).  Jenkin grew up near the Merry Maidens Stone Circle, a collection of standing stones that have remained in a jagged circle since the Bronze Age, so his personalized familiarity with the history and cultural memory of the region has led to a twisted and discomforting portrait of human isolation, exaggerating the fear and paranoia associated with loneliness, creating an ominous reminder of how easily things are forgotten, where something truly terrifying can end up taking the place of everything we thought was familiar.  

Understanding Mark Jenkin's Cornish Folk Horror YouTube (17:12)