‘Hors du Temps’ Review: Olivier Assayas Takes A Personal Look Back At Life Under Covid Lockdown – Berlin Film Festival
18.02.2024 - 03:09
/ deadline.com
There is a sense of a running gag in Hors du Temps (renamed Suspended Time for the English-language market). In his complex, autofictional 2022 TV series Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas cast as the director of a film called Irma Vep — a film he had, in fact, made in real life 20 years earlier — the actor Vincent Macaigne, who cheekily developed a version of Assayas that not only picked up on his distinctively reedy voice, but also nobbled his quirky irritability and sensitivities.
That character was called Rene, but he was not a million miles from Paul, the character Macaigne plays in this account of two brothers confined with their partners for the duration of the Covid lockdown. They have returned to the house where they lived as boys and where they have rarely returned since: a vine-covered cottage in a picturesque hamlet. It is a glorious summer, just like the remembered summers of childhood. The sun shines constantly.
If Assayas really is embarking on a later-life version of François Truffaut’s symbiosis with actor/avatar Jean-Pierre Léaud, documenting his own life through an alter ego, he is clearly not out to flatter himself. Like Rene, Paul is a film director. Also like Rene, he obsesses over details, and Covid provides plenty of grist for this mill: When he washes his hands, he puts his iPad next to the sink to follow instructions on optimum hand-sanitation on YouTube. He agonises over bringing in the mail, washing clothes that may have crossed paths with the postman’s viral traces. He bleaches the door handles.
He and his brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), a music journalist who is a much cooler cat, are supposed to alternate picking up the groceries, but Paul is so terrified that the pick-up system of boxes
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