When the gatekeepers of film culture changed during the Nineties — from cineastes to opportunists — France’s postmodern humanist filmmaker André Téchiné always had to battle it out with a lesser contemporary, Olivier Assayas, who, being younger, heterosexual, and solipsistic, became a festival-circuit favorite. The competition began in 1995, with Téchiné’s emotionally intense Wild Reeds against Assayas’s remote Cold Water. Since then, it’s only Assayas whose newest releases always receive U.S. import and media attention. Téchiné’s four most recent films remain unshown here while Assayas’s latest, Suspended Time, is now playing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center — putatively art-cinema’s definitive exposition of the Covid lockdown experience.

Assayas recounts his return to his family’s country estate in the Chevreuse Valley, about an hour’s drive from Paris, when the epidemic broke out in 2020. Paul (Vincent Macaigne) is the Assayas figure, sharing a cottage with his younger brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), a pop-music critic and podcaster. Each sibling co-habits with a female partner (Nine D’Urso and Nora Hamzawi) who bears witness to the boyish competition — Paul’s germophobic anxiety and Etienne’s laissez-faire self-sufficiency.

By taking us inside the gates of privilege, Assayas provides the clearest-yet illustration of how the cultural elite coped during Covid. The brothers display rarely acknowledged liberal acquiescence — that phenomenon where leftists embraced every condition of the lockdown. (It often seemed that the only people not affected by Covid were politicians and the media elite.)

Assayas has never been outright political. His best films — Sentimental Destinies, Demonlover, Irma Vep, Carlos — assumed political awareness while being ideologically vague. Although the title Suspended Time (Hors du temps) indicates distance, it also expresses detachment from common experience. Paul and Etienne’s lives are excluded from urban-lockdown hardships. Their navel-gazing gives the film a beta-male, liberal weakness. (Paul is going through divorce, communicates with his psychotherapist by cellphone, and idolizes the painter David Hockney; Etienne retreats to his love of American pop rock, ranging from the Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” to Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul.”) These highbrow scions willingly comply with the lockdown, casually knuckling under to tyranny that changed the world. This is possible especially when you live on your own estate, surrounded by family heirlooms of their Western cultural advantages (old books, tasteful furniture, a personal photograph of Modigliani). Only Etienne critiques their dependence on leisure-class consumerist condition, calling Amazon “a war profiteer.”

Hollywood filmmakers don’t dare question Covid tyranny and rarely depict it, as proved by the hysteria of Ari Aster’s Eddington. Assayas’s superficial honesty is to his credit, especially when Paul and Etienne ponder epigenetics. Still, their terror of the world outside their gates (as when Paul encounters his ex-wife and estranged daughter) is hardly resolved.

Suspended Time has been praised as “a personal work of auto-fiction” and “a film à clef” (referring to its sidelong glance at Assayas’s breakup with his wife, filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love). But this is a way for cinema gatekeepers to once again congratulate only the filmmakers they relate to, who don’t trouble their conscience. (Meanwhile, Téchiné’s recent films Golden Years, Farewell to the Night, and Soul Mates don’t need to address Covid since his understanding of human experience is never trendy, but timeless.)

Assayas self-consciously mixes real and invented elements here. His Dylan reference ignores the Covid-era shock and moral and political issues at the Trumpian core of “Murder Most Foul.” It allows gatekeepers to ignore the pampered idiocy of Assayas’s worldview.

One unfortunate review of Suspended Time excused it this way: “Time passed in lockdown, making it feel as if it ran forever, but at the same time nothing significant really happened in our lives, making it feel like no time passed at all.” This does not misrepresent Assayas’s vision but is, in fact, everything that’s wrong with it. Suspended Time never accounts for the life-changing social and spiritual repression that altered the culture. Macaigne, with his bovine meekness, looks nothing like Assayas, but the portrayal suggests a self-pitying con job, as if to excuse his lack of political rigor. This probably accurate depiction of upper-class indifference makes Suspended Time distinctive yet rather infuriating.