SUSPENDED TIME Trailer: Olivier Assayas Examines Life During Lockdown in Personal New Comedy

For his latest feature, Suspended Time, Olivier Assayas drew on his personal diary to revisit his experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown with humor and reminiscence. Shot on location at his late father’s home, the comedy stars his frequent collaborator Vincent Macaigne as a filmmaker locked down in Normandy with his brother (Micha Lescot) and their girlfriends (Nora Hamzawi and Nine d’Urso) as tensions rise. Over a year after its world premiere at Berlinale, Music Box Films will release it at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center on August 15 and at Los Angeles’ Laemmle Royal on August 22, before expanding. The official U.S. trailer has now arrived.

Here’s the official synopsis:

As society recedes in the spring of 2020, film director Paul Berger (Vincent Macaigne) returns to his childhood home in the provincial Chevreuse Valley. 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. Yet Paul also finds a surprising refuge in the compulsory quietude of pandemic life, an opportunity to reconnect with the books and art and enchanted forests of his youth. A scabrous French comedy from master filmmaker Olivier Assayas, Suspended Time is a sharply personal and fiercely neurotic ode to the eternal expanse of memory and the allure of life beyond our personal screens.

Check out the trailer and poster below.

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