Personal Shopper (MIFF 2016) director Olivier Assayas proves it is possible to make a beautiful lockdown-set film in this bittersweet, intimate comedy.

How many of us have had the chance to wrestle with how the disconnection of COVID has impacted our lives? Assayas, who holed up in his family’s rambling country estate with his brother and their partners, has. In this wittily metatextual musing on the fear of the great unknown of that period, he asks Vincent Macaigne to depict an analogue of himself named Paul, who claims to have directed Irma Vep (MIFF 1997) but who is not the same character that Macaigne played in the show of the same name (MIFF 2014), itself a mischievous update of Assayas’s original film. Meanwhile, highly strung Paul’s interactions with his easygoing brother Etienne exhibit their humorously differing responses to the pandemic.

You’ll chuckle at the obsessive-compulsive worries, the petty frustrations and the strained familial relations in this Golden Bear–nominated fancy that namechecks everyone from painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir and David Hockney to the late, great Stranglers keyboardist Dave Greenfield. But the whole in this inventivework of autofiction reaches for something grander: Suspended Time is a thought-provoking contemplation on how the past became very present in isolation.

“Gently smart and warm-spirited … Assayas augments the ethereal quality of life in isolation with a sophisticated but playful interweaving of fiction and the reality behind it.” – Slant