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.  

Where the Crawdads Sing

 

Director Olivia Newman

Producer Reese Witherspoon with lead cast

cinematographer Polly Morgan with Daisy Edgar-Jones

Mark and Delia Owens

Author Delia Owens

Delia Owens

Newman, Witherspoon,Edgar-Jones,Taylor John Smith, and Owens

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING    C                                                                                     USA  (125 mi)  2022  ‘Scope  d: Olivia Newman

Sometimes I feel so invisible, I wonder if I’m here at all.                                                               —Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones)

A cinematic interpretation of the best-selling novel by Delia Owens, topping The New York Times bestseller list for two years in a row in 2019 and 2020, making her fiction debut at the age of 70, with a script written by Lucy Alibar, who seems to have a thing for movies set in southern states, having previously written the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the southern Gothic depiction in Benh Zeitlin’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #1 Beasts of the Southern Wild, and while filmed in Louisiana, this one is set in the marshlands of North Carolina, near a fictional town called Barkley Cove.  Produced and championed by actress Reese Witherspoon, who advocates female-centric stories, gushing endlessly about how much she loves the novel, describing it as “a love letter to growing up in the South,” with the popular novel selling 22 million copies, Excerpt from Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens, part coming-of-age novel and part crime drama, intertwining issues of law, race, gender, morality, and murder, but it is not without controversy, as part of author Delia Owens’ hidden past has come to light, having been involved in a real-life murder case with her now-estranged husband Mark Owens and his son Christopher.  Like the protagonist in the story, Owens had a lifelong love of nature and wildlife, having studied biology at the University of Georgia, where she met her husband Mark, receiving a degree in zoology before obtaining a doctorate in animal behavior from the University of California at Davis, both avid conservationists moving to Africa to study animals in their natural habitat, spending more than twenty years there, writing several books and articles for professional journals, yet what they really found deplorable was the rampant poaching of elephants and rhinoceroses in Zambia who were senselessly killed for illegal tusks and horns that could be sold on the black market.  Desperate to stop this bloody practice, their activism grew more militant, seeing themselves as guardians of the wildlife, instilling a white savior approach to policing the Zambian wildlife preserves, with Mark and his son conducting airborne raids against poaching camps, where they were emboldened enough to call an ABC News show Turning Point to follow them on one of their raids, with their cameras capturing footage of a suspected black African poacher who was actually shot on camera, wounded initially, followed by several more rounds coming from offscreen until he was dead, which aired in a documentary special entitled Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story on March 30, 1996.  An in-depth investigative article was written by Jeffrey Goldberg from The New Yorker, March 29, 2010, The Hunted | The New Yorker, where he actually interviewed the cameraman, Chris Everson, who shot the TV footage, who identified Christopher as the shooter responsible for the deadly rounds.  Owens rarely discusses this matter in public, having distanced herself from the event and the participants, simply claiming she was not involved in the shooting, though she and the others are still wanted for questioning by the Zambian police, as the body has never been found, evidently dropped from a helicopter into a nearby lagoon, likely devoured by crocodiles, with all three of them leaving the country immediately afterwards and have never returned.  One of the things that stands out is that the 2018 novel echoes many of the same themes from Delia Owens’ life in Zambia, drawing on her experience of living in the wilderness, cut off from society, with eerie similarities to the murder there, while also including a pattern of perpetuating racial stereotypes.  Even the jailhouse cat whom the protagonist befriends while awaiting trial is named after a Zambian man, Sunday Justice, who once worked in the Owens’ camp as a cook.  This is simply the backdrop to the film, which became a hot topic when Taylor Swift wrote an Instagram post that she was a big fan of the book, adding eyes to the project, writing that she “wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story,” writing a song that plays over the end credits, Taylor Swift - Carolina (From The Motion Picture “Where The ... YouTube (2:53), using mostly women in key creative positions, directed by Olivia Newman, who has a Master’s degree in film from Columbia University.

A film that screams Hallmark made-for-TV movie where women are a central focus, with parallels to the trial sequence in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), while also recalling Mary Steenburgen in Martin Ritt’s CROSS CREEK (1983), a fictionalized adaptation of a trip to the back woods of Florida in the 1930’s where author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling, based in part on Rawlings’ 1942 memoir Cross Creek, yet also Andrei Konchalovsky’s SHY PEOPLE (1987), a Faulknerian story set in the back bayous of southern Louisiana.  With a production budget of $24 million, this is a story about abandonment, domestic abuse and neglect, the long-lasting impact of trauma, the power of literacy and friendship, and the wild, beautiful spaces of the marsh, where the naturalistic setting is the film’s calling card and is the dominant aspect overshadowing all else, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING – First 10 Minutes YouTube (9:57), although it’s hard to miss a flying CGI heron in the opening sequence that transports us into the marsh, opening in 1969 with a dead body discovered at the bottom of a 63-foot tall observational fire tower, with the police attempting to discover if the victim was intentionally pushed or whether it was accidental.  “A swamp knows all about death, and doesn’t necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly not a sin.”  Moving back and forth between different periods, with the changing timelines shown on the screen, another flashback to the early 1950’s reveals a backwoods family living along a pristine marsh with an alcoholic and abusive father, whose violence against his wife and kids drives them away from the home one by one, leaving ten-year old Kya Clark (Jojo Regina) alone after her father leaves, creating a series of improbable events, where she is forced to raise herself in that isolated swamp accessible only by boat traffic, with no electricity or running water.  Kya is the lead protagonist, much like Delia Owens, a naturalist and loner, shunned by the neighboring town and community, who view her only with derision and contempt, disdainfully referred to as the “Marsh girl,” mocked for her poverty and ridiculed out of school on her very first day, leaving her unable to read or write as she grows up, instead she spends her time observing and drawing the natural wildlife, especially the birds, developing an extraordinary artistic talent, where her shack is lined with these watercolors.  She is also a curious collector of feathers, shells, leaves, flowers, and other wild things, assembling quite a collection, where her home becomes a repository of these discovered items, like a “glass menagerie.”  Her only friends in town are a black couple running a general store, Mabel and Jumpin’ Madison, (Charlene Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr.), who assume the role of guardians once all her family has left, the only ones really looking out for her, and she survives by selling them mussels.  Based on her outsider status, ostracized and reviled by the community, where she pretty much just keeps to herself, she is the likely suspect in the opening murder, with the police arresting her, building a case solely on circumstantial evidence, yet her name is dragged through the mud all over town, where the only townsperson willing to look through the glaring wall of prejudice is retired attorney Tom Milton (David Strathairn).  There is a stark contrast between the purity of innocence that Kya represents, completely immersed in the world of the marsh, befriending the wildlife, her one and only real friend, where her moral compass, social expectations, and concept of justice are shaped by observing the natural world, while the real dangers and threats come from the contaminating influences of town.  Where most individuals would struggle with isolation and self-preservation, Kya learned to thrive, enjoying every tiny aspect of nature, learning that everything is interconnected, all in harmony with the elements.  Once she’s older, blossoming into British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, requiring a dialect coach to learn a southern accent, she eloquently narrates the story through a series of continuing voiceovers, adding a literary aspect along with wisdom beyond her years, and a perspective that is all her own, something of a wild child, yet restrained and self-reflective, never looking dirty or unkempt, with no sign whatsoever of bugs or mosquitoes out in the marsh, which is a bit of a mystery, seemingly impossible, so viewers are equally transported into a world of make-believe, which is sumptuously shot in ‘Scope by Polly Morgan, with music by Mychael Danna.

Equally improbable is a series of two drastically different love interests, neither one fully fleshed out, feeling more like movie characters, expressed through flashback sequences as Kya languishes in prison awaiting her trial, as Kya is befriended by Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), having run into him throughout her childhood fishing in the marsh, finally meeting him out in the woods, lured by feathers left behind on an old tree stump, both sharing a common interest in nature, but he’s about to head off to college to study biology, but before he does he lends her books and teaches her to read and write, even writing down names of publishers that she can send her drawings off to for a possible book, providing another potential source of income.  Both seem inseparable, but his father warns him that rumors about them could jeopardize his future.  He heads off early for a job working in the biology lab, but promises to return on the 4th of July, asking her to meet him, but when the night arrives he’s a no show, leaving her utterly devastated, Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) - Tate Doesn't Come Back ... YouTube (3:09), where her many years of loneliness only accentuate the excruciating feeling of loss, “Being alone is a pain whose vastness is so great you can hear echoes.”  Miraculously, one of the publishers comes through, enthusiastically supporting her work, where the money she earns actually allows her to buy up all the land around the property, ensuring that it’s not stolen out from under her by developers, who are planning luxury condos out in the marsh.  Years later she begins a relationship with Chase Andrews, played by Harris Dickinson from Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats (2017) and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (Sans Filtre) (2022), a pompous and promiscuous football star who is something of a charmer and sweet talker, used to getting everything he wants, and he wants Kya.  While viewers can spot a cad immediately, Kya is not so worldly, and is more easily ensnared, with next to nothing known about this man, often taking her feelings for granted for his own sexual pleasure, where he seems to manipulate her at every turn, even making plans for marriage without even asking her, but he does find a rare shell that she makes into a necklace and gives back to him, which he never takes off, but the real kicker happens when she sees him in town with another girl who’s engaged to be his wife.  This deception hits like a ton of bricks, where she really doesn’t want to have anything more to do with him, but he doesn’t take no for an answer, drunkenly having his way with her, punching her in the face and forcing himself on her, violently raping her, where she has to beat him in the head with a rock to get him off of her.  She had seen this violent behavior before with her father, “One thing I learned from Pa, these men must have the last punch,” where destruction is a way of punctuating their pent-up rage and anger, as he ends up trashing her home, with destroyed drawings strewn all over the place.  Shortly afterwards she is arrested for his murder, though she was in another town visiting with her publishers for the first time face to face, celebrating yet another published book, but the prosecutor believes she could conceivably have disguised herself while taking a night bus back to Barkley Cove and back again with none of the publishers noticing her absence.  Nonetheless, it’s a disturbing time, turning into an extended trial sequence, where the victim is none other than Chase Andrews (Owens’ version of a poacher), a local big shot, as his parents are loaded with money, where it’s their influence that is driving the trial, literally demanding her conviction after that necklace he was wearing goes missing at the time of his death, suggesting only Kya would have any real interest.  The direction of this film is simply unremarkable, with problematic characters, as Kya is overly saccharine and sweet, even saintly, while the men in her life are predictably one-dimensional, and the supporting characters in town couldn’t be more diabolically stereotypical, with the entire town literally sneering at this girl, treating her with nothing but contempt, preferring to believe she’s an inferior uncivilized being out in the marsh, where they don’t begin to understand or appreciate who she really is, much more intelligent and morally complex than they give her credit for.  It’s something of a sentimentalized mystery movie, where small-town prejudice is a prevailing theme, but despite a reverence for nature, with wild creatures doing what they need to do in order to survive, it’s a tepid, overly sanitized and simplistic rendering that is never fully believable.