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.  

Tender Mercies

 

Palmer, Texas

farmhouse as it is today, just East of Waxahachie

 

Director Bruce Beresford

Duvall winning a Best Actor Academy Award

TENDER MERCIES          A                                                                                                  USA  (92 mi)  1983  d: Bruce Beresford

You see, I don’t trust happiness.   I never did.  I never will.                                                         —Max Sledge (Robert Duvall)

With the recent death of actor Robert Duvall, who died of natural causes in February at the age of 95, it’s worth remembering the one role that won him an Academy Award for Best Actor, as it’s a throwback to gentler times, where his hugely understated presence infuses the film with a quiet simplicity in this organically realized redemption story about the price of fame, the devastating destruction of the bottle, and the will to recover from horrendous mistakes in life.  Completely unpretentious, never offering any easy resolutions, nothing is ever taken for granted, as each day matters in the road to recovery.  Not nearly as well known as it deserves to be, curiously turned down by David Lynch after he made ELEPHANT MAN (1980), thinking he wasn’t right for the film, it’s aptly named, written by Texas native Horton Foote, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who won an Academy Award for the lyrical screenplay, having won the same award for his earlier adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), with Foote developing a reputation for evoking everyday American life in beautifully observed minimal stories that allow the actors to shine, as Gregory Peck also won an Academy Award for his role as Atticus Finch in Lee’s legendary novel, one of the most beloved roles in American cinema, and a film where Duvall makes his first screen presence as the reclusive and pathologically shy Boo Radley.  Foote and Duvall were good friends spanning five decades, with Duvall reading a letter honoring their friendship at Foote’s funeral in 2009 (Remembering Robert Duvall and Horton Foote).  Duvall is known for his larger-than-life presence in Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1978), uttering the infamous line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” and will always be associated as the level-headed consigliere in Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972), where his favorite role, according to interviews, was playing an ex-Texas Ranger in Lonesome Dove — TV mini-series (1989), but it is here that he really carves out a distinctive place in his career, as this is a quieter, more reserved performance, defined by stifled emotions and the decency of the human spirit, listed at #14 of Premiere magazine’s 100 Greatest Movie Performances of All Time.  Described by film critic Pauline Kael as a “bare-bones ‘art’ movie,” intentionally avoiding big grandiose scenes, even the use of close-ups, instead filming from a respectful distance, this is a spare depiction of rural Southern life where not much ever happens, filled with long silences and the dialed-down poetry of spoken words, a reminder of simpler times where honesty prevails, having a neighborly respect for others, and above all, an effortless display of human kindness.  Very few films are able to achieve the authenticity established here, not just in the immensity of the empty landscapes, but in the personal connections, as we’ve lost this ability to connect on such an intensely personal level, where this becomes a beautiful portrait of the human spirit.

Robert Duvall stars as a washed-up country singer Mac Sledge, a star who’s fallen on hard times, almost always seen wearing a Stetson hat, an alcoholic estranged from his family who has hit rock bottom at the beginning of the film, seen as just a shadow through the window, where all we hear are the violent voices and sounds taking place behind closed doors in a remote country gas station motel on an isolated stretch of highway, with Mac eventually sleeping off a two day bender, finding himself completely broke and unable to pay for his lodging, so he asks motel owner Rosa Lee (Tess Harper in her first screen role), if he can work off his debt, which she kindly agrees to, but only with the stipulation that no alcohol is allowed while working.  Widowed at a young age, she lost her high school sweetheart husband during the Vietnam War, which looms in the background like a ghost, leaving her to raise her young son alone, a child who never knew his father.  Surprisingly, Mac ends up sticking around for months, working for his room and board, with a small salary thrown in, literally disappearing off the face of the earth, with no one knowing where he’d gone, where that anonymity seems to help him come to his senses, regain some semblance of stability, and recover from his own largely self-inflicted personal tragedies.  Like a safe port in a storm, they end up getting married (entirely offscreen, even the proposal), but he still struggles with his demons while haunted by his past, as we’re not even aware he was once a major star until well into the picture.  Country music is a thread that runs through this movie, something the studio executives failed to comprehend, eventually losing faith in the film, failing to understand what it was about and how the music connects to what was at that time a massive unidentified audience, providing few resources to promote it, but country star Willie Nelson was impressed by the authenticity of Duvall’s performance and offered to step in to help promote it.  Most importantly, co-producer Robert Duvall wrote some of the songs he sings in the film and does all his own singing, feeling a genuine connection to the character, which is why it works so well.  Authenticity is the key, something movie studios today still have a hard time understanding, producing very few films that fit that criteria.  The film helped define the American independent film movement of the 1980’s by initiating a trend of personal filmmaking that often looks beyond Hollywood conventions.  Emblematic of that is an early scene with Mac playing a song for Rosa Lee’s son Sonny (Allan Hubbard, who never made another film) in the kitchen, which is remarkably minimalistic, yet rooted in something we all universally understand, Tender Mercies Scene YouTube (2:07).   

The relatively barren locations are perhaps more reflective of West Texas, taking place on a little desolate stretch of flat land, yet the film was mostly shot in and around Waxahachie and Palmer in north central Texas by Australian cinematographer Russell Boyd, who has the distinction of shooting one of the most beautiful films ever made, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), while the film is directed by fellow Aussie Bruce Beresford, whose groundbreaking war drama BREAKER MORANT (1980) helped usher in an Australian New Wave, so it may come as a surprise to some that an Australian is able to so eloquently capture the poetic nuances of small-town America, yet that is what truly elevates this film over so many others.  Perhaps the only other film that gets the unique distinctiveness of the South right, particularly Texas, is Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), which was adapted by Larry McMurtry from his own novel, though the Truman Capote autobiographical adaptation of David Perry’s A Christmas Memory - made for TV (1966) captures the subtle nuances of small-town life in rural Alabama.  Tess Harper was raised as rural and working class herself, coming from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, providing just the right touch of firmness, grace, and mercy, with an ever-observant eye, always watching over others.  The film has a stripped down, almost raw feel to the narrative, taking its time, only revealing what’s essential, as so much is expressed by what is left unsaid, where every scene feels valued, contributing to the overall build-up of the interior realms of the characters.  With its themes of sin and redemption, forgiveness, hope, and personal transformation through religious faith, some may recognize this as a religious movie, as it also speaks to the power of prayer, which is where the title comes from, with the kind-hearted frontier woman Rosa Lee, a devout Christian, revealing, “Each night when I say my prayers I thank God for his tender mercies,” which is simply a wonderful revelation, whether it has religious intent or not.  The church also figures prominently, as the family attends a Baptist church on a regular basis, accentuating the singing of the hymns and the idea of baptism (the visual expression of baptism by immersion is rare in films), where it eludes to the possibility of being reborn in the spirit of the Lord.  God does not protect us from the inevitable pains and sufferings of life, but he knowingly sends the “tender mercies” that somehow make life worth living, regardless of the circumstances.  Most people do not recognize this as a religious movie, but to those who see it that way, this is a profoundly powerful film, as religious a movie as you could ever find, as it speaks of God in an unusually secular way, yet is also fundamentally human, expressing the stirrings of love in an existential sense.

Initially released in only a handful of theaters, coinciding with the early days of MTV, which is diametrically opposite to what this represents, it was a box office dud until word of mouth spread, as critics who saw it provided enthusiastic reviews.  While it’s rare for movies to portray rural characters as complex human beings, the back story revolves around Mac’s embittered ex-wife, Dixie (Tony Award winning actress/singer Betty Buckley), who became famous singing Mac’s songs, Betty Buckley from "Tender Mercies" singing "Over You YouTube (3:59), the first country single to be nominated for an Oscar, with Wilford Brimley as her over-protective manager Harry, but their contentious divorce-filled allegations of alcohol-fueled violence left their daughter in limbo, with Dixie refusing to allow Mac to see or speak to her as she grew up.  Now that she’s reached the age of 18, Sue Ann (the wonderful Ellen Barkin sparkles in a very early role) can decide for herself, as their worlds intersect briefly when she pays him a visit, a girl he barely knows, where she remembers a song he sang to her at night, but she can’t quite remember it.  Taken by surprise, Mac doesn’t either, but the moment she leaves he’s seen alone at a window with his back to the camera quietly remembering the song in what may be the film’s most poignant moment, with the song carrying the central theme of the movie, “On the wings of a snow white dove, God sends his pure, sweet love,” Tender Mercies (1983) - “A Song You Used To Sing To Me ... YouTube (2:59).  With the encouragement of a band of local kids who idolize him, Mac makes a comeback, of sorts, balancing the sacred and the profane, singing with them in a honky tonk bar, Clip from "Tender Mercies (1983)" YouTube (3:22).  The film deals with a constant refrain of “champagne ladies” and “broken dreams,” the subjects of his old songs, but also paints a picture of how much it hurts to face reality, expressing the pain of mortality, where nothing can explain the sudden loss of life of a loved one, especially a child, as there is so much meaning packed into such a devastating loss, where there are simply no words that can fill the empty hole in one’s heart, but love may be the closest thing we have, in all its forms and permutations, with real emotion literally filling the screen in the haunting final moments when reality comes crashing into our lives in the most unexpected way, Scenes & End Credits from "Tender Mercies (1983)" YouTube (4:31).  The final musical ballad, the Craig Bickhardt song You Are What Love Means to Me YouTube (4:11), which takes the film to the end credits, feels surprisingly commercial and out of place, completely altering the tone of bare essentials and stripped-down authenticity, though the lyrics do fit the story.  Still, it may be the film’s only misfire.  Mac comes to embody a second chance in life, whose redemptive arc is largely a symbol of a possible resolution to the American chaos and disorder inherited from the 60’s and 70’s, yet despite the anguish and grief associated with death, where there’s no clear answer or road map, love prevails, in all its simplicity and grace, as in the end that’s all we really have to fill the void of meaninglessness.