Laurent Cantet's Time Out

Time Out is one in a series of European films this decade has produced—including Le Couperet, El Principio de Arquimedes, La Graine et le Mulet and Cantet’s own earlier movie, Ressources Humaines—about the agony and desperation occasioned by being unemployed, but also about the struggle in the aftermath of a layoff to either maintain an identity that has been shaped by the corporate world or to forge a new one.

The Premise of Time Out

Sympathetic, 40ish Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) is downsized from his corporate job. Rather than tell his wife Muriel (Karin Viard) and their teenagers (played by Cantet’s own real-life children) about this unfortunate wrinkle, however, he methodically and yet somewhat surreally creates and implements a Ponzi scheme.

Simultaneously, Vincent crafts a second believable but equally fictional life for himself as a United Nations executive—less difficult than it sounds, as he lives near the Swiss border and takes pains to carefully study the UN’s current outreach program in the Third World, the better to believe his own story and to be believed.

Ironically, Vincent’s job in keeping his various fictional lives up and running requires much more skill, industry and daring than his corporate job ever did. How long can he maintain his deception? How far will he go to avoid coming to terms with “reality,” whatever that is?

Psychological Nuances of Time Out

Although the story itself, co-written by Laurent Cantet and Robin Campinillo (the duo also wrote the recent Cannes winner, The Class (Entre les Murs) and 2005's Vers le Sud) is suspenseful on its face, it is the psychological underpinnings that keep the viewer entranced.

Vincent has a loving and close relationship with his family and friends, and he is in every respect the picture of the serious, intelligent bourgeois. It is exactly his seriousness that allows him to succeed in deceiving his family about the UN, and even, during an unauthorized visit to Geneva, walking around the halls of the headquarters unmolested and seemingly a part of the operations.

Vincent desperately needs to see himself as a provider and as a productive member of society, almost to the exaggerated extent that a “family annihilator” does.

His family, meanwhile, is proud of him but baffled by his barely explicable absences and strange behavior, and they struggle in their various ways to break through to him. For his part, Vincent substitutes the doling out of ready cash, impassioned explanations of his world-changing work and long-distance cell phone calls for true emotional intimacy with his family.

Cantet’s Vision

Cantet directs the film with a steady hand. Vincent’s likeability is the linchpin of the movie’s effectiveness, as we watch him drift in and out of respectability, increasingly engaging in behavior that even anti-hero lovers would deem dastardly.

Our sense that Vincent is in moral freefall creates moments of dramatic tension, making even benign preludes seem somehow sinister; yet, through it all, we empathize with and even root for him.

The Job/Use of Time in Time Out

The French title, L’Emploi du Temps, offers the double meaning of “the use of time” and “the job of time” (just as the English translation means both taking a break and, more sinisterly, running out of time).

This is certainly not the first film to draw cynical parallels between the industry of crime and the crime of industry. Still, rather than escaping the deadness of his corporate job, Vincent has at first merely transferred the abstract stress involved in maintaining a corporate lifestyle into a pragmatic and real fright.

He drifts through his criminal enterprise as any corporate drone would through his office day, adrift and thus capable of somehow persevering. Losing either of his “jobs of time” must necessarily involve a shattering of his identity. Far from rejecting his corporate life, Vincent craves a return to it.

Thus, the movie asks us to reconsider our banal view of our working lives. It’s a cliche to complain about work, especially in the corporate world, as a life-draining and subtly immoral force, yet Time Out gently admonishes us to answer the question: Given the chance, what use would we make of a Time Out?

Time Out Wins Awards

Time Out won the 2001 FIPRESCI Prize “For a powerful, visually impressive portrayal of existential anguish and alienation in a corporate society governed by competition, status and success.”

Aurelien Recoing

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