TIME OUT (L'Emploi du Temps) (director/writer: Laurent Cantet; screenwriter: Robin Campillo; cinematographer: Pierre Milon; editor: Robin Campillo; music: Jocelyn Pook; cast: Aurélien Recoing (Vincent Renault), Karin Viard (Muriel Renault), Serge Livrozet (Jean-Michel), Jean-Pierre Mangeot (Vincent's Father), Monique Mangeot (Vincent's Mother), Nicolas Kalsch (Julien Renault), Marie Cantet (Alice Renault), Félix Cantet (Félix Renault), Christophe Charles (Fred), Nigel Palmer (Jeffrey), Maxime Sassier (Nono), Olivier Lejoubioux (Stan), LaetitiaJamila Abdallah (Fati), Didier Perez (Philippe); Runtime: 132; ThinkFilm; 2001-France)
"A rare human drama that is politically and psychologically motivated, yet in its unpredictability it succeeds without giving voice to conventional dogmas."
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The middle-aged, easy smiling, placid, well-dressed Vincent Renault (Aurélien Recoing) is a financial corporation executive who lost his job and failed to tell his picture-perfect family -- consisting of his part-time teacher wife Muriel (Karin Viard), his judo competing teen son, the one whom he wants to relate to the most but can't because of his eldest child's withdrawal, Julien (Kalsch), adolescent daughter Alice (Marie Cantet), and the youngest son, Félix (Félix Cantet). Instead for the last 3 and 1/2 months, he pretends he's still working as he lives out of his car and contacts his wife periodically by cell phone telling her fictional things about his workday -- such as his imaginary appointments, hard to deal with clients and team meetings. This is starting to wear on him, not the road experience but in having to face his wife and father at home, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up the lie. His only pleasure is riding in his car (he upgrades to a Range Rover when he scams his friends) at a leisurely pace around the beautiful snowy landscape of the French Alps without any purpose, and eating in convenience stores after sleeping at night in his car. He lives in an unnamed wealthy French suburb near Grenoble, which is near the Swiss border. Soon he wanders across the border and enters a corporate UN office building in Geneva that attracts his attention because it looks so proper and pristine. He picks up the company fact-filled brochures, eavesdrops on office conversations and on a board meeting, and suffers the indignity of getting booted out by the security guard when he sits too long in the lobby observing the visitors. But he manages to learn that the private company is connected with the U.N.'s economic recovery program in Africa -- they appear to be training managers who will go into Africa's emerging markets. He tells his family he now works in this prestigious workplace, a place whose noble purpose is to help the unfortunates. From his brief observation of the workplace, he invents his management position in the firm and tells his family in great detail about what he does but is vague about other job-related details.
"Time Out" is a gripping psychological drama about the modern psyche and the pressures that exist to work at something that is useless except for the material benefits it provides. It is one man's meditation on the perils of modern life and its demands, and how he is caught in the trap of materialism. Vincent worked for 11 years in the same firm before he was fired because the company felt he lost his enthusiasm. To explain how he feels about losing his job, Vincent tells a stranger that the only thing he liked about work was being alone in his car and driving. Eventually he couldn't show up to meetings in time as he preferred driving around, and his boss had to let him go. For his wife, parents and children, he can't say anything to explain himself, eventhough he does love them and chose not to abandon them.
In the need of quick money and not being a con man, he nevertheless invents a 'get-rich-quick' investment scheme and effortlessly gets his former workplace friends and school acquaintances to trust him blindly by greedily investing in a shady secret bank account in Russia's emerging market.
The only one who is somewhat suspicious is his adoring wife. She smells something fishy about the new job in Geneva, especially, since she can't comprehend why he took it without consulting her, and the only phone number he can be reached at is his cell phone. Yet when they converse, he lies about his new fake position with the earnest passion of a man who is genuinely troubled about his workplace problems and is able to deeply touch his wife with his sensitivity and emotional pain he is experiencing. It is as if what he is talking about is really his new position and not his confused state of mind. His wealthy father is a cynic whom Vincent was never able to please. But his father still lends him enough money to get an apartment in Geneva, telling him that he's proud that his new job is so prestigious. This Oedipal conflict causes Vincent to feel shame that he can't be honest with his father and look him in the eye (at one point of the story Vincent also tries to buy Julien off with money and finds that Julien has trouble facing him). Vincent's children are too self-absorbed with just growing up to care less about what he does for a living, and are happy as long as they continue to live in the upscale style they are accustomed to. The normal family lifestyle continues uninterrupted because Vincent is so conditioned that he can't think of himself as not working or being without his family or living without his current status in the community. The film successfully drives home the point that it might seem that Vincent lost his mind, but he's really someone in a bad state because he's in a limbo period between unnecessary jobs that corporations create for the upper-middle-class to maintain their rich lifestyle. Even when one of Vincent's more genial former workers and lifetime friend (Sassier) drops out to do what he loves -- to make his own studio music -- he still can't let go of the habit forming greed that he had when working for the corporation, as he blindly invests in Vincent's 'get-rich-without-any-scruples' scheme.
Overhearing Vincent hustle his friends in the lobby of a hotel, a sharp-eyed, friendly, snake-like businessman, Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet), spots him as an honest man who out of necessity became a scam artist and persuades him to work in his less risky scam before he faces jail. By working this racket, it gives our hero a chance to return the money he took from his investors and show that he really cares about his friends. Jean-Michel imports fake brand-name items from Poland. He brings back such things as fake Reeboks, which are sold cheaper than the real thing. The director, Laurent Cantet (Human Resources), wishes to show how the dishonest Jean-Michel' business is still more genuine than the ones our hero worked for or pretended to work for, those legal corporations which regularly dupe the public with their fake projects and don't even give them a palpable product in return like Jean-Michel.
The film is overwhelming in large part because of Mr. Recoing's tour-de-force performance as a sensitive family man in the middle of a mid-life crisis, where he's fighting for his life to make sense. Through him, as the 'everyman,' we can see how so many careerist get trapped in jobs they hate but see no alternatives. It's a gloomy but penetrating look at modern western civilization, with no forthcoming answers. It lays out a twisting road of choices that allows each viewer to see the answers they might choose for themselves. A very relevant film for our times and a subject not taken seriously enough by most filmmakers, yet it is a universal concern -- as choosing the right line of work is a problem that everyone could relate to.
Laurent Cantet's slow pacing, measured looks at the workplace, fantastically mesmerizing color coordinated shots, the unobtrusive and tingling pitiful chamber background music provided by Jocelyn Pook, and the long silences to let the unemployed man's desperate situation sink in, help to make this an absorbing masterpiece that has no time for frivolous melodramatic scenes which would have only taken away attention from Vincent's real dilemma. A rare human drama that is politically and psychologically motivated, yet in its unpredictability it succeeds without giving voice to conventional dogmas. The film's ending is not a happy one, but a confirmation that once you start lying to yourself there's no cure -- lying will only become a permanent part of your life -- it will lead to a more strenuous life. Once Vincent's lies set in, it is impossible for him to return to the workforce and think he has come to his senses. That is the reason he turns down both legitimate and black market offers, while he tries to find his way in this artificial world he created for himself -- one he can't seem to escape from. He has reached out for the unattainable without learning who he is, and has done this by reinventing himself as a fictitious bourgeois character who can't let go of his materialism for the simple childish joys he really would be content with -- such as: "riding around in circles." His lies will probably lead him down a life of inevitable disasters and future heart attacks. No wonder the film is so wonderfully bleak, enigmatic and hardly reassuring, as it follows around this dull company man without a company who is given to fantasies but is not a horrible human being -- just someone who convinces us to feel sorry for him and become oddly enough thrilled by the strangeness of his everyday experiences!
Time Out was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. It should also be noted that the only professional actors were the great stage actor Aurélien Recoing and the film actress Karin Viard, as the nonprofessionals and professionals worked magnificently together.
REVIEWED ON 6/28/2002 GRADE: A +
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
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