IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
TIME OUT (EMPLOI DU TEMPS)
Directed by Laurent Cantet
PG-13, 132 minutes, in French with subtitles
You could ransack the Hollywood archives and be hard pressed to find a movie based on a true story in which the boffo fire-and-death histrionics of the real life ending are tempered down for fiction. And yet that's just what French director Laurent Cantet (Human Resources) has done in his second feature, Time Out, an absorbing character study about an out-of-work man who pretends to his family that he's taken an important job with the UN. The story that inspired Cantet is that of Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who convinced his family and friends he was a medical researcher for the World Health Organization, while he drove around in his car and watched tv in cheap hotel rooms. Romand pulled this off for an incredible eighteen years, living off family money, and maintaining an image as a pillar of his community. When his deception threatened at last to unravel, he set his house on fire, and murdered his parents, his wife, and his two children. He's now doing life in a French prison. Cantet fashions this into the story of Vincent (Aurelien Recoing), a middle-class husband and father who has lost his job but hasn't told his family. He keeps going out as if to work, but spends his time instead driving, hanging out in hotel lobbies, even drifting into office buildings with the employees and wandering hallways as if on his way to an appointment. One day he drives to Switzerland, where he eavesdrops on a UN agency meeting and tells his family he has been offered a job with the organization. He spends time away from home on "business trips", sleeping in his car and keeping in touch with his wife (Karin Viard) by cell phone. When he returns from these trips, his two young children rush out to greet him, and he impresses his wife and his parents with the importance and the humanitarian mission of his new job. Eventually his wife begins to suspect that something's wrong, but she can't pin her suspicions down. When he needs to show some income, Vincent hits up his father for a loan to buy a condo in Switzerland (much more practical than spending the UN housing allowance), and runs an investment swindle on old friends who are impressed with his stature as a United Nations official and practically beg him to take their money, no questions asked. A hotel detective (Serge Livrozet) who tumbles to his game and befriends him points out that this can't go on forever. "Sooner or later they'll want their money back," he says. Vincent knows he's right, but he's just not prepared to deal with it. He has a third child, an adolescent boy who seems devoid of ethical sense. This is troubling to Vincent, who sees himself as a basically moral man, even when he joins the hotel detective in the smuggling of black market goods. Vincent's life is in free fall. He has no exit strategy. He's like the man who has leapt from a tall building, and on his way down keeps remarking "So far, so good...." The probability is overwhelming that there will be a sudden and unpleasant end to the journey, but in the meantime it offers a certain liberated exhilaration. Recoing brings a low-keyed everyman believability to the character of Vincent. He's an unremarkable person. There's none of the flamboyance of a worldly charlatan. He's a family man, a caring husband, son, and father. But he's trapped in passivity, riding a relentless current of mendacity from which he has neither the power nor the impulse to break free. Cantet emphasizes this by showing him repeatedly as being on the outside, looking in through windows at life. At one point he reminisces about the days when he still had a real job, and remembers that driving to appointments was what he liked the best. Sometimes he wouldn't even show up at them; he would pass the turnoff and follow the road: "It was easier to just keep going...."
The movie whittles the time frame down to a matter of months rather than years. Cantet is fascinated by the truth that we are what we do, and that without employment we effectively cease to exist. He tells his story in chilly tones of blue, observing his character's increasingly frightening drift toward the abyss, and slowly ratcheting up a vague sense of dread. Vincent could be heading for a soul-crushing fate like the real-life monster Romand's, but Cantet has subtler things in mind.
The ending he delivers is ambiguous. It could be real, or it could be fantasy. Or it could be that sometimes it's very hard to tell the difference between the two.
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