Hors du temps

The latest feature by Olivier Assayas recalls the pastoral pleasures of his 2008 drama L’HEURE D’ÉTÉ, albeit adjusted for the age of Covid. Vincent Macaigne (playing a version of Assayas once again) is Paul, a filmmaker observing lockdown in his family’s idyllic country home with his girlfriend (Nine d’Urso), brother (Micha Lescot), and his brother’s partner (Nora Hamzawi). Trapped in perpetual leisure time, the couples examine their lives and the history of their relationships, while an introspective voiceover narration (delivered by Assayas himself) punctuates the human intrigues. Assayas, who based the film on his personal lockdown journals, is also attuned to the absurdities generated by such suspended conditions—the brothers’ contradictory views on Covid safety measures give rise to humorously petty tensions. HORS DU TEMPS is a pleasantly meandering French talkie, its bantery dialogue rich in musical and artistic references, yet it also tempers this bourgeois levity with self-deprecation. During lockdown, it was easy to worry about things never going back to normal, and yet for many of us, the opposite was equally true. HORS DU TEMPS embraces this fraught feeling: the fear of things going back to the way they were. (Beatrice Loayza) 

Olivier Assayas: DISORDER (1986), L’ENFANT DE L’HIVER (1989), UNE NOUVELLE VIE (1993), L’EAU FROIDE (1994), IRMA VEP (1996), FIN AOÛT, DÉBUT SEPTEMBRE (1998), LES DESTINÉES SENTIMENTALES (2000), DEMONLOVER (2002), CLEAN (2004), BOARDING GATE (2007), L’ HEURE D’ÉTÉ (2008), CARLOS (2010), APRÈS MAI (2012), CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014), PERSONAL SHOPPER (2016), DOUBLES VIES (2018), WASP NETWORK (2019)