Olivier Assayas’s Suspended Time premiered last year at Berlinale, where Slant’s Pat Brown wrote of the film: “By virtue of the shared experiences it speaks to, Suspended Time may be Assayas’s most universally relatable film to date.” That would be the shared experience of life during lockdown, as Assayas’s latest tells the story of how, as society recedes in the spring of 2020 due to the pandemic, a film director named Paul Berger (Vincent Macaigne) returns to his childhood home in the provincial Chevreuse Valley.
According to the film’s official description: “Still processing the legacy of his parents and feeling out the uncertain shape of the world to come, Paul hunkers down with his documentary filmmaker girlfriend Carole (Nora Hamzawi), his music journalist brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), and Etienne’s new girlfriend Morgan (Nine d’Urso). Squabbling over the minutiae of health protocols and the morality of a hermetic lifestyle mediated by ubiquitous online shopping, the makeshift household finds new ways to lacerate familiar wounds.”
Today, we’re proud to premiere the U.S. trailer for Assayas’s ode to, per distributor Music Box Films, “the eternal expanse of memory and the allure of life beyond our personal screens.”
Suspended Time is in select theaters on August 15.
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