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.  

That Day, On the Beach (Hai tan de yi tian)

Director Edward Yang on the set

Wu Nien-jen, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Chen Kuo-fu, and Chan Hung-chih

THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (Hai tan de yi tian)             B+                                                       Taiwan  (166 mi)  1983  d: Edward Yang

Edward Yang, along with his compatriot Hou Hsiao-hsien, are the two central figures of the New Taiwanese Cinema movement of the 1980’s, where Yang’s visual and narrative style is among the more distinctive aspects, easily the most literary and novelistic of this young group, as his films are quiet, slow, and pensive, using a minimum of dialogue, often using images alone to condense and/or omit dialogue, with many invoking comparisons to Antonioni, with this film in particular resembling similar existential themes as L’AVVENTURA (1960).  The 60’s was a decade in search of the alienated modern soul, personified by the soul-searching emptiness of Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), a film that initially shocked audiences, where the initial efforts to find a person who has mysteriously disappeared are soon forgotten, showing how easily we lose our way, wondering how we became so indifferent to the rapidly changing world around us, dissecting middle class discontentment by delving into the heart of existential angst.  This film highlights a similar disappearance of a central figure “that day on the beach,” accentuating the expanse of the landscape, where the lives of other characters seem to revolve around that disappearance, caught up in their own delusions and self-deceptions, revealing a shift in how we understand the world around us.  The Antonioni comparison continued with his next films, as Taipei Story (Qing mei zhu ma) (1985) has been compared to L’ECLISSE (1962), and The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi) (1986) to BLOW-UP (1966).  While Yang seemed to resent that Italian comparison, the role of European art cinema played a role in his development, though his films are passionately connected to a specific place, as he consistently addresses problems associated by the modernization of Taiwanese life.  Born in Shanghai, his father came from a southern province Guangdong, his mother from Hebei in the north, part of the impoverished intelligentsia, with both working as office clerks in the nationalist government, moving to Taipei at the age of two, a time when millions of mainlanders fled to the island of Taiwan fleeing the Communist revolution of 1949, later moving to the United States to study computer engineering, working as a software programmer in Seattle for eight years, telling the famous story about how he happened to walk past a Seattle cinema in 1980 that was playing Herzog’s AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972), where he walked in and came out a different person, igniting an excitement, quickly returning to Taiwan to make films.  He was among the four different young directors chosen to make the generational coming-of-age portmanteau film IN OUR TIME (1982), departing from the kung-fu action and romantic melodrama films of the earlier decades, creating a more realistic aesthetic, drawn from daily life, compared stylistically to the Italian neorealism movement, considered revolutionary at the time due to its innovations, where Yang’s contribution is a 30-minute segment entitled Expectations starring cinema legend Sylvia Chang from King Hu’s Legend of the Mountain (Shan zhong zhuan qi) (1979), an acutely delicate, poetic sketch of a young teenage girl as she reaches puberty, arguably the first film attempting to treat Taiwan’s recent past, which is considered the first example of Taiwan’s New Cinema Movement.  Perhaps due to the director’s commitment to formal experimentation, finding a niche within a global film community of festivals and art cinema, many of his films have done poorly domestically, while they have been lauded internationally.

The first of his so-called urban trilogy that also includes Taipei Story (Qing mei zhu ma) (1985) and The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi) (1986), featuring confused characters teetering on the brink of middle-age, using narrative structures that become sequentially more experimental, this is generally acknowledged as the first full-length feature of the Taiwan New Wave, a modernist exploration of the alienation of the individual in the barren urban landscape of contemporary society, emphasizing psychological complexity, sending a message that material prosperity is no guarantee for happiness.  Co-written by Yang with Wu Nien-jen, who plays the father NJ in Yang’s final film Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000), it’s also the debut feature of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, known for the luxuriant moodiness established in his long association with Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, with Yang using a subdued and much more experimental approach, as the entire film is told in flashback, and at times, flashbacks within flashbacks, using the Mildred Pierce (1945) model, implementing methods that had never been seen before in Taiwan cinema.  Using a rigorously modernist aesthetic with a highly unique style, look, and feel to present a vision of contemporary Taiwan, Yang places a huge emphasis on women’s role in a capitalistic society and the consequences they suffer from historical and social changes, representing a split between ancient values, patriarchal traditions, and the need for liberation from old stereotypes and impositions.  Pervasive themes include alienation in human relationships, indifference, crime, and the effects of materialism, focusing almost exclusively on the urban middle class struggle to find new value in the fast-changing environment of the urbanized city, searching for an uncertain yet everchanging national identity, which is explored in even greater detail in Taipei Story (Qing mei zhu ma).  Spanning a period from the 50’s to the 80’s, this film coincides historically with a period when Taiwan transformed itself from an agriculture to an industrial society, where most of the resources are concentrated in urban areas.  Dismantling the agricultural social structure is accompanied by the erosion of traditional values of authority, such as arranged marriage, which is a central premise of the film, while also investigating the complexity of women’s experiences and interiority.  The protagonist of the story is Jia-li (Sylvia Chang), a modern woman who meets an old childhood friend Ching-ching (Terry Hu) at the beginning of the film, a famous classical pianist who is returning to Taiwan for the first time in thirteen years, where the two talk and reminisce in a modern city restaurant, with the film jumping back and forth between past and present, deftly exploring the changes in social relations in context with Taiwan’s transition into a globally oriented society.  Jia-li’s family perfectly represents the traditional patriarchal family, where the father’s authority as the head of the household is unquestioned, with the mother playing a supportive role, even having to put up with his marital infidelity for the sake of the family, a recurring theme running through all of Yang’s films, a time when conformity was the rule, inheriting a social structure from the Japanese occupation of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, when Taiwan was returned to China.  The family lives in a Japanese style house, wear Japanese style clothes, and use futons for sleeping, all holdovers from the old world, rural society.  The gist of the film is breaking away from those traditions, with characters often caught in between the past and the present, finding themselves living in undefined times, where adapting to the everchanging present is a key to their success. 

Ching-ching was the childhood sweetheart of Jia-li’s older brother Jia-sen (Tso Ming-hsiang), seen early on watching him at a rugby game, but the relationship abruptly ended when their father arranged for his marriage to someone else, a loveless marriage and a shocking development in his life, but it fit the traditional demands of family life, as their father (Nan Chun) is a stern physician who runs his own family clinic out of the home and demands absolute obedience from his wife and children, content to sacrifice the happiness of their children to reinforce outdated, old world ideals, expecting the son to follow in his footsteps, so he is sent to medical school in order to inherit his father’s practice, something her brother initially thinks he wants to do but later comes to regret.  In order to emphasize this cultural juxtaposition, the film opens with the music of Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto, as Yang loved to intersperse classical musical motifs throughout his career, accentuating the interplay between traditional values and Westernization.  In a later childhood memory, we see Jia-li and her brother as infants sitting at a table where they’re forced to sit with their father as he listens intently to Beethoven’s 6th Pastoral Symphony, evoking an extraordinary poignancy, as we see he’s attempting to instill in them the idea of expanding their cultural horizons, but he’s not allowing them to explore for themselves, instead he’s forcing it upon them against their will, symbolic of his iron will, a force that his children are helpless to fight against.  Skillfully moving effortlessly between characters and time frames, a hallmark of Yang films, we soon discover the highly enigmatic and complex narrative is about Jia-li’s tragic marriage and the suicide or disappearance of her husband “that day on the beach,” quickly filling in her own backstory with an infusion of Elvis Presley at a school dance, a theme explored further with A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), as she meets De-wei (David Mao), a gentle spirit who captures her heart, feeling instantly compatible.  However this elation is soon met with her father’s own wishes to marry her off to another gynecologist, obviously very pleased with himself, feeling elated, and relieved, “That’s a weight off my mind,” That Day, on the Beach [海灘的一天] (Edward Yang, 1983) - Excerpt YouTube (2:56).  Defying her father’s decision, however, Jia-li escapes in the night and elopes, running off to Taipei as she marries De-wei in a public wedding ceremony, resulting in exile from her family, an action that announces the coming of a new era of free love, where the wife is free to make her own decisions.  But the bulk of the film sees their marriage deteriorating, as it’s not what she thought it would be, trapped in a no man’s land, as her husband is never at home, married to his job and the afterhours drinking extravaganzas associated with the Asian business model, exclusive only to his all-male business associates, one of whom is fellow New Wave director Hou Hsiao-hsien, evocative of boyhood scenes from Hou’s own film made that same year, THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983).  Working for his childhood best friend, Ah-Tsai (Ming Hsu), who has always been something of a womanizing playboy, where everything’s been handed to him on a silver platter, De-wei, on the other hand, feels alienated within his own group, pressured to constantly produce money for the company, yet feeling that same pressure from his marriage, unable to connect with either one, continually leaving him feeling exhausted and emotionally depleted, turning to a psychiatrist for help, though without his wife’s (or the viewer’s) knowledge.  A scathing indictment of capitalism, not only does it oppress the wage earners, but it disproportionately affects women even more, stuck in suffocating relationships, fed the same delusions that consumerism is the answer to all their problems, but they’re forced to endure the crushing disappointments of the men, stuck in meaningless jobs, often taking out their frustrations on their wives in a vicious power struggle to salvage what’s left of their shattered dreams, with Jia-li exhausted and at her wit’s end heard uttering “Our society tears men and women apart.”

A sign that something is amiss is Jia-sen’s struggle in dissection class, an indication that perhaps he’s chosen the wrong field, yet he perseveres for his family’s sake, where his life is carefully choreographed ahead of time, destined for misery, much as Edward Yang’s own life was by his own parents, heading off to engineering school to please them, before breaking from the preordained path and constructing something completely new, tapping into his creative instincts.  Ching-ching has had to do much the same, deemed unsuitable by Jia-sen’s parents, burying her repressed desires into classical music and studying abroad, building an entirely new career for herself, but it came with a price, as her incessant touring, required for building a name for herself, kept her away from home.  With this film Yang seems to be suggesting that events have a ripple effect in people’s lives, where the title of the film implies one thing, yet the actual storyline follows the multiple threads that reverberate and echo off that traumatic event, creating their own unique storylines that never could have been anticipated.  While Ching-ching is a world renowned artist introduced in the beginning of the film, the story shifts to the more pedestrian life of Jia-li, whose hopes and dreams are shattered by the emptiness of her “perfect” marriage, suffering from loneliness and boredom, deftly exploring that void, symbolized by the traumatic moment she receives the news that her husband has drowned.  But it’s not what it seems, as she doesn’t recognize any of the clues uncovered by the police, and hasn’t seen him in days, so she has no understanding of his state of mind with suggestions of suicide, suddenly realizing she doesn’t really know this man at all.  Yang shifts into a documentary mode as various fishermen are interviewed, recalling a strange man alone on the beach, never moving from that spot, seemingly all day and into the evening, later seen wading into the water, which was too cold for swimming, eventually realizing he was gone, but some of his personal effects were discovered on the beach.  Yang’s film is a Proustian exploration of memory, examining the changing tides of history, but also the circuitous paths one takes, like branches of a tree, each reflective of a different aspect of one’s life, with suggestions that the whole, or the entirety of one’s life, remains a mystery that can never truly be understood, instead we are left with fragments of memory that can only hint at the deeper meaning.  The ocean symbolizes that vast unknown, an inescapable fixture on the landscape, where the blue horizon is endless, yet seemingly it will offer a clue as to what happened to her troubled husband.  While she sits around waiting for police to uncover pertinent evidence, she is visited by Ah-Tsai, who reports De-wei has secretly been embezzling company funds, thinking he may have actually gotten away with it, and might be in some faraway country by now.  It should come as no surprise that Ah-Tsai is only interested in his money, showing no concern whatsoever for the well-being of De-wei, or his disappearance, viewed exclusively as an underling who will have to be replaced.  However, this information clears a path for Jia-li, discovering he had been cheating on her, and his business partners as well, ultimately realizing it doesn’t really matter if that’s her husband’s body they’re searching for out in the ocean, as he’s already gone from her life forever, as this is an irreparable breach, finally coming to the realization her marriage unraveled some time ago.  All taking place in a conversation at a restaurant, what it uncovers through multiple flashbacks is nothing less than epic, a journey of self-discovery and personal transformation, employing the most novelistic of narrative devices.  The film lacks the fluidity of his other films, and often feels distant, resorting to long shots and extreme long shots, which only increases the sense of detachment, accentuated by the ambiguity of a subversive finale, yet it unquestionably carries an impact.  While it may not be the masterpiece that Yang’s next several films would be, as a debut film it’s a remarkable achievement, even when viewed today, as there are few other films like it, yet it doesn’t get the recognition of some of Yang’s other films, shrouded in mystery even to this day, yet despite the melancholic overtones, it exudes a hopeful optimism, suggesting the past prepares us for the future.      

That Day On The Beach (subs) : Edward yang - Internet Archive  entire film, with English subtitles, YouTube (2:46:22)

FILMADRID & MUBI: The Video Essay—"Taiwan As A Window ...  While none of the excerpts chosen are from this film, they are instructive nonetheless, video essay by Rafael Guilhem, June 15, 2017, YouTube (5:49)