Berlinale 2024 #3, with Olivier Assayas on Suspended Time

Published: Feb. 19, 2024, 10:15 p.m.

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2024 Berlinale kicked off on February 15. Throughout the festival, we\u2019ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year\u2019s selection, including new films by Olivier Assayas, Mati Diop, Bruno Dumont, Hong Sangsoo, and many more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter to stay up-to-date.\n\nOne of the early and most anticipated premieres of this year\u2019s festival was Olivier Assayas\u2019s new film Suspended Time. It\u2019s a kind of companion piece to his 2008 movie Summer Hours, not to mention his recent TV series Irma Vep, although Suspended Time is the filmmaker\u2019s most direct foray yet into autofiction. The film is based on the time that Assayas spent during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 confining with his brother Etienne\u2014and their two partners\u2014in their childhood home in the French countryside. The film stars Vincent Macaigne as a thinly veiled onscreen surrogate for Assayas (as in Irma Vep) and features dramatized scenes of the two brothers bonding, clashing, and reminiscing on the ways in which this house and home shaped them as artists and as men. Assayas also weaves interludes throughout the film, narrated by the director himself, in which he reflects on the objects and the landscapes of his youth, and how they\u2019ve influenced his cinema. \n\nOn today\u2019s Podcast, FC Co-Editor Devika Girish interviewed Assayas about the making of the film, his thoughts on the genre of autofiction, and his relationship with his leading man, Vincent Macaigne, who he describes as an \u201cagent of chaos.\u201d