It is spring 2020, and the world has just started grappling with the Covid pandemic. Chubby-funny, forty-something-year old filmmaker Paul (Vincent Macaigne) and his haughty, permanently shade-wearing musician/radio presenter brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) live in a large countryside masion, which they inherited from their father. The setting is idyllic, with bellflowers painting the landscape blue, and cherry and apple blossom adding the perfect touch of heavenly bliss. The weather is sunny and breezy. They are in the company of their beautiful partners, respectively Morgane (Nine D’Urso) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi). Strict lockdown rules have been implemented, and people are still coming to terms with the bizarre new requirements (the now all-too-familiar masking and social distancing). Paul communicates with his mother, his little daughter and her mother via Zoom, as most of us did back then. They feel trapped inside a timeless bubble, a relatable sentiment to anyone who was living on planet Earth that year.
Most of the film consists of petty family arguments, particularly as Paul lapses into what his brother describes as “neurosis”. He takes all of his clothes off before entering the house and insists that groceries should be left untouched for four hours upon arriving in the house. Etienne complains that such amount of time may lead to a bacterial infestation in the dairy products. The duel is on: virus versus bacteria! Which one is going to win? While Paul is very concerned about the pandemic, Etienne is far more precious about mundane house rules. He complains about the television volume at night and becomes infuriated at the prospect of his sibling walking on the freshly mopped kitchen floor. Ironically, it is the “neurotic” brother who manages to enjoy the pandemic: Paul finds pleasure in the suspension of time, while Etienne struggles to live in this temporary state of isolation.
This highly personal film is dotted with autobiographical elements, and Paul is clearly a proxy for the French director (who happens to be a little older, at the age of 69). There are repeated allusions to his work, including the casting of Kristen Stewart (the star of 2017’s Personal Shopper, and incidentally also the president of the jury’s at last year’s Berlinale), filming in Cuba (a riff on 2019’s The Wasp Network) and even a brief mentioning of 1996’s Irma Vep. These references are vaguely fictionalised (they are not literal mentions of Assayas’s work). The name of an artist called Guillaume Assayas is briefly displayed, and that too is presumably made-up.
Assayas goes beyond self-referencing. This is a movie intoxicated with artistic namedropping. While Etienne constantly talks about musicians such as The Stranglers, Primal Screams and the Beach Boys, Paul is particularly fond of painting and literature: David Hockney, Monet and Gustave Flaubert are amongst the countless artists named. It feels a little silly and idiosyncratic. Unless you are the biggest die-hard fan of Olivier Assayas and are curious to find out more about the smallest of his interests.
Olivier Assayas’s 18th feature film boasts honesty and spontaneity. The dialogues are relatable (if hardly revealing). The characters feel human and endearing. The trifling malaises of the bourgeoisie are recognisable. The best scene is in the epilogue, when Paul finally meets his daughter in person (presumably late in spring), and breaks some very unexpected news. She is unable to comprehend the significance of her father’s gesture. The naivety of the child combined the fatherly warmth of the adult are guaranteed to put a smile on your face. On the other hand, the film fails to inspire and engage. The topic of the pandemic and its domestic repercussions is so universal that it’s hardly revealing. Much like a gentle spring breeze, Suspended Time is pleasant and warm, however also innocuous and fugitive. At times, you will barely feel it, and you won’t even remember it the following day.
Suspended Time just premiered in the Official Competition of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.
Prolific French director Olivier Assayas follows up the recent success of Personal Shopper with the work entitled in English Non-Fiction, and in French, Doubles Vies (“Double Lives”, in free translation); both titles provide complementary clues to the content. This film is in complete contrast to the earlier film which was a mysterious, intriguing and often ghostly exploration of how grief at the death of a twin brother affects the surviving twin sister.
In Non-Fiction, the subject matter deals with the present and the story unfolds in order to to reveal the complexity of the long-standing friendships and relationships of a group of friends who live in the centre of Paris. The foursome at the centre of the film have known each other for years and are part of a wider circle of friends who meet to enjoy each other’s company, eat, drink and converse.
Those familiar with the French language will undoubtedly get more from the long, discursive debates about the future of the printed as against the digital world, while those with a familiarity of film will enjoy the references to Bergman and Haneke. The cultural background extends to a literary reference to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard. While some may find it too wordy, there is humour, wit and even mockery in the exchanges. Serena’s (Juliette Binoche) defence of the role she plays in a popular TV crime series, explaining more than once she is not “a cop” but a “crisis management operative”, is particularly interesting.
At the core of the narrative is the involved relationship, professional and personal, between publisher, Alain, (Guillaume Canet) and Leonard (Vincent Macaigne). This is tested when Alain rejects Leonard’s latest book. It is an acknowledged fact that the material for Leonard’s books are his most recent affairs, often with women in the public eye. The film follows the issues that this creates with the full understanding of another dimension only emerging towards the end.
The mise-en-scene which draws the viewer into the atmosphere of life in Paris is thoroughly enjoyable. At the same time, Assayas highlights to the limitations of this sophistication. Most of the group are so Paris-centred, that they have no idea of the geography of France. Leonard’s partner, Valerie ( Nora Hamzawi) an advisor to a left wing politician, is the only one with knowledge and engagement with the industrial world outside Paris.
While the characters involvement with each other is complex, there is great warmth in the way they relate to each other. The acting subtly gives depth to the characters. The cinematography by Yorick Le Saux supports Assayas’s clever dialogue which is thoroughly engaging and credible. A film which deals with the cultural issues of our time through the eyes of a director steeped in French culture. Highly recommended.
Non-Fiction is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, October 18th, with previews across the country on Saturday, September 7th. On VoD in April.On BFI Player in June (2023)
Olivier Assayas is a very prolific filmmaker, with a career spanning nearly four decades and nearly 30 movies under his belt. His latest flick Personal Shopper is a very unusual blend of horror and fashion set in Paris, starring the American model and actress Kristen Steward. This is major change from his previous film, the acclaimed Clouds of Sils Maria (2014): a lesbian drama starring Juliette Binoche and taking place in the Swiss Alps.
His latest movie tells the story of Maureen Cartwright (Stewart), a young American working in Paris as a personal shopper for a celebrity called Keira (Nora von Walstatten). She has the ability to communicate with spirits, just like her recently deceased twin brother. She is now trying to communicate with her recently deceased twin brother, and it’s other ghosts that cross her path.
Victor Fraga from DMovies met up with Olivier in London as the director came to the UK for his film release, and he’s says that Brits have been very positive about his new film. So we decided to ask him a few questions about the unusual connection between horror and fashion, the French horror genre, making an English-language film in France, international co-productions, Brexit and more!
Victor Fraga – France doesn’t have a consistent tradition of horror, but instead sporadic pieces such as Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960). Why do you think that is? Do you think there is some sort of prejudice in the country against the genre?
Olivier Assayas – If you look closely there’s actually a strain, perhaps more of an undercurrent. The French have a different approach to genre. American horror is defined by this Manichaean opposition, where the visible is good and the invisible is evil. The embodiment of evil is always lurking under the surface. That’s not the way the French and, in a certain way, the European tradition works.
What I mean is, the “hidden”, the supernatural is often benevolent and benign to the French, it doesn’t have to be bad and evil. In Personal Shopper I tried to reconnect with this very specific aspect of French cinema. That’s something you see in the movies of Jacques Rivette, which are pretty much ghost stories. He’s been very influential on my work. I wrote for André Techiné when I was very young the screenplay for Rendez-vous [1985], which was also some sort of ghost story. Georges Franju is my biggest reference, he’s a remarkable filmmaker. His work is fascinating, with this strange relation to the silent era. Silent films are also very meaningful to me.
Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face is one of Olivier’s biggest influences
VF – Horror normally mandates a lot of bodily fluids: blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, yet Personal Shopper is relatively “clean” and the scares are subtle. Do you think such fluids would have ruined the fashionable outfits?
OA – I suppose I’m not big on that. You have families within genres, and I think I would connect to Alfred Hitchcock, Dario Argento and John Carpenter. They don’t show the gore.
VF – The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) was very gory, wasn’t it?
OA – Yes, you are the right. That’s the only one, when he suddenly spits it out. But it’s not there in the other ones, particularly his early movies.
VF – Was it a conscious decision to leave the gore out?
OA – Yes, it was. There is a similar opposition between fear and gore and between eroticism and pornography.
VF – Ghosts on the telephone are no novelty in cinema, there’s for instance, a remarkable sequence on Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) of such nature. Yet computer literate entities are a novelty. Where did you get the idea from? Have you received such ambiguous messages yourself?
OA – Your question is interesting [spoiler alert: jump to the next question if don’t want to find out about the twist in Personal Shopper] because, in reality Maureen is not speaking to a ghost, she’s speaking to Ingo. She just thinks it might be an entity. I intended to have very little ambiguity, but a lot of people seem to take that side road. Basically it’s guy who is stalking and observing her.
The question I raise is: how can you be seduced by someone you can’t see and whose gender you don’t even know? That was really what I trying to question. But why does Maureen get entangled in this? Because she’s ultra-sensitive; she’s waiting for a sign. So she suddenly asks: “are you living or are you dead?”, and she breaks down in tears because she thinks she’s going nuts.
Olivier Assayas talks to DMovies in posh central London hotel, not too different from the places depicted in his latest movie
VF – Horror and fashion are a very unorthodox mixture – horror is jarring and unsettling, while beauty and splendour are meant to prevail in fashion? Did you purposely set up a very challenging task for yourself, or do you think that the two, in fact, have a lot in common?
OA – I have no prejudice in terms of where horror can happen. The more real the environment, the scarier the movie. I’m sure Dario Argento has done similar stuff. In any case, it was mostly about getting the environment right and giving it some sort of documentary feel. I tried to recreate the fashion background in a way that’s believable.
VF – Could you please explain what you mean by “documentary feel”? I never got the feeling that your film was a documentary.
OA – I don’t mean documentary in terms of syntax; I mean creating a realistic environment, but not real in the Ken Loach sense. I also wanted it to be as weird as it can be.
VF – And what do you mean by “weird”?
OA – The way we live is weird. Someone like Keira [Maureen’s celebrity boss] does exist. She floats on top of things. She has a flat in Paris where she stays for just a few days, and a boyfriend who occasionally flies in from Germany to see her, and she uses her personal shopper Maureen in order to connect with brands. It’s some sort of ghost world, except that it’s real and some people do live like that. Weird in the sense that it’s disconnected from the rest of society.
On the other hand, Maureen is a foreigner, she has no friends and no family, and she doesn’t even speak the language. So what kind of work can she do? She can only do stupid jobs like carrying bags from one place to the other. There’s something very alienating about her, but at least it’s real and you can relate to it.
What’s interesting about the fashion world is the ambiguity: Maureen both loves and hates her job. She’s attracted to it because it deals with something she’s trying to come to terms with: her femininity. Which is similar to the relation we have to the modern world: we are dismayed by materialism, but simultaneously we are craving to be part of it. There’s a metaphor in my movie.
Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is a foreigner doing a very “stupid” job in Paris
VF – This is not the first time you blend English with other languages in your films, in countries where English is not the mother tongue. Is that because you wanted to work with Kristen? Or is it because you wanted to give your film an internationalist feel? Did that upset the French?
OA – Yes, of course the French were upset. They don’t make my life easy, particularly in terms of financing. You don’t get any subsidies for films like Personal Shopper in France because they are in English language, and therefore considered an international movie. So I have to finance my films in the global market, where I’m considered an indie French filmmaker with little potential. It’s like a tighrope.
I’m interested in transnational culture, I think that the communication between languages and cultures is very exciting, very contemporary. A movie like Personal Shopper makes sense because it’s foreigners in Paris. Also, this approach enabled me to work with multiple actors; not just Kristen Stewart but also Lars Heidinger and Nora von Waldstatten. It opened doors and possibilities, and not just in terms of narrative.
VF –Personal Shopper is an international co-production between France and Germany, yet it’s London that the main character visits. Why is that? Would you consider a co-production with the UK and does the prospect of Brexit affect that?
OA – The problem is that it’s extremely expensive to shoot in London, so we had to get it all done in just one single day. I decided to film in London because I wanted Maureen to have a long text message conversation, but that only makes sense if she’s doing something else at the same time. If Maureen went to Milan instead she wouldn’t have to go through customs and sit on a lounge. A journey to London offered more background action.
Brexit doesn’t change anything for me. You normally have co-production frameworks between countries, and they exist with nations outside the EU. I think that what will change are the subsidies for British films opening in France, and the other way around. Sadly, Brexit means that there will be fewer British films showing in France and fewer French films showing in Britain!
The world-famous American actress and model Kristen Stewart has teamed up with the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas for the second time (after 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria), now in a film with a peculiarly different premise. The helmer decided to focus on the subject of celebrity again, but this time moving from a Lesbian drama taking place in idyllic Switzerland to a ghost story set in a very urban Paris.
The big question of course is: how do you blend horror devices, which are meant to be jarring and unsettling, with a fashion environment, where beauty and splendour are meant to prevail? Assayas has set a very difficult quest upon himself, albeit not an impossible one. France does not a a strong and consistent tradition in the horror genre, and instead a few sporadic classics such as Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju/Claude Sautet, 1960). So Assayas had to use his very own blueprint in order to come up with personal variant of French horror. The outcome has been very divisive: Assayas received the Best Director Ex-Aequo prize last year at Cannes Film Festival, but the film was also booed in the same event. Personal Shopper is indeed an audacious and creative pieces, but a number of flaws make it a little incoherent and difficult to engage with.
Maureen Cartwright (Stewart) is a young American working in Paris as a personal shopper for a celebrity called Keira (Nora von Walstatten). She has the ability to communicate with spirits, just like her recently deceased twin brother. She is now trying to communicate with her recently deceased twin brother, and it’s other ghosts that cross her path. She is determined, however, to remain in the French capital until she has spoken to her dead sibling. She begins to receive strangely ambiguous text messages on her telephone, from an unknown source. She travels to London for a work errand, but she’s consistently harassed by the stranger on the phone on her way there. Are the dead now able to communicate through 21st century technology, or is someone pulling a prank on Maureen?
There are elements of paranormal activity, fashion and erotica in this very unusual horror flick
The scares throughout the film are very sparse, maintain the “creepy-glam” atmosphere throughout. There are elements of erotica, paranormal activity, murder and fashion in this multi-flavoured film gumbo (or perhaps casserole?). But this multitude of genres and references make the film a little disjointed and fragmented, much like a broken mirror. For example, we never find out why Maureen is in Paris, what exactly happened to her brother and why the whole saga is in English. I wonder whether French nationalists were outraged at the absence of their own language, surely an American worker would working in Paris be expected to pick up French? Maybe Personal Shopper does not want to be perceived as French film at all, but instead as an international endeavour.
Aesthetically, the film is also very hybrid. Entities probably don’t care much about fashion (they always seem to wear the same attire, don’t they?), so the idea of them creeping into this plush and colourful world is a little preposterous. Some nicely timed flying objects and green ectoplasms will make you jump from your seat, but overall a feeling a awkwardness will linger, and the inevitable WTF will occasionally spring to mind. Assayas is a very talented and bold filmmaker, but he still has some edges to polish in this newly-created horror-fashion “genre”.
Personal Shopper was out in cinemas on Friday, March 17th (2017). On Disney + UK on Friday, July 22nd (2022). Also available on other platforms.
