Labor Pains
In 1993, Jean-Claude Romand, a doctor for the World Health
Organization, killed his wife and their two children. He then
shot his parents, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, and
torched his tony suburban Geneva mansion. Unfortunately for him,
the suicide attempt failed, and he was arrested and sentenced to
life in prison. Sensational as the crime was, it was the
apparent motive for his rampage that captivated the public:
Romand, it turned out, had never been a doctor, much less worked
for the WHO. For 18 years, he had kept up the deception, piling
lie upon lie until the money ran out -- which is when he decided
to take his family's life, as well as his own.
Time Out, a new movie by French director Laurent Cantet,
takes its inspiration from the Romand case, but its trajectory
differs crucially from its source. Cantet is more interested in
the circumstances that produce someone like Romand, rather than
the murderous pathology of a desperate individual. A
surpassingly rich and urgent movie about the way we live now,
Time Out takes as its starting point the lie that a lost
soul tells his family and friends to preserve his place in his
bourgeois milieu. Awful as the lie is, the rot, the movie makes
clear, isn't just in the liar: it's also in the world that makes
him.
The liar's name is Vincent (Aurelien Recoing). Slightly pudgy
and somewhat stolid, Vincent is a familiar, middle-aged,
middle-management type: a wife, three kids, a smart home in the
suburbs. Amplifying the sense of domestic security, his affluent
parents live close by, if perhaps a little too close for
comfort. There is an air of despondency and defeat in Vincent
when we first meet him, and we find out why soon enough. Fired a
couple of months earlier, Vincent has yet to tell anyone. He
spends his days wandering the French highways and countryside,
telling his wife that his jaunts are business trips.
The lies grow. Forced by his pushy father to spill details of a
mysterious "job opportunity" in Geneva, he concocts a glamorous
consulting position at the U.N. Cramped for cash, Vincent starts
enlisting old college friends into what they think is a
lucrative investment scheme via his new post. In the midst of
all this, he meets Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet), a hotel
proprietor who moonlights as a trafficker of smuggled goods.
Recognizing a kindred spirit in Vincent, Jean-Michel takes him
under his wing, employing the increasingly hard-up Vincent in
his smuggling operation.
Paced like a Chabrol film and just as riveting, Time Out
initially presents Vincent as a rambling prole bereft of
structure and community once he's been evicted from his cubicle.
A particularly affecting scene has him sneaking into an office
building and wandering pathetically through the familiar
sterility of a corporate space. Peeking in at meetings and
rifling through stray documents, Vincent puts on the show of a
man at work. Always watching others from behind windows and
glass doors -- some images recalling Tati's Playtime --
Vincent is also aware that he isn't the only one doing the
watching. His story is pervaded by paranoia, as his fear of
being observed, of being found out, heightens with each new
prevarication.
Predicated on Recoing's ingratiating smile and inscrutable mien,
the movie explores how work and identity have collapsed into one
another. Halfway through, Vincent reveals that he had, in fact,
courted his firing. He confesses to Jean-Michel that the only
thing he liked about the job was driving to it; he liked it so
much that some days he just kept driving. It's a stunning
revelation, and recasts all that preceded it. What seemed
pathetic now takes on the edge of rebellion -- the man who
wasn't there, it turns out, didn't want to be there at all.
It's easy enough to blame corporate culture for the woes of the
world, but Cantet refuses such strident moralizing. Its hushed
surface belying an indignant core, Time Out subtly
depicts the everyday intercourse of business as a fatuous
charade. In their insulated, gleaming boardrooms, businessmen
are the exemplars of empty "globalization," juiced by talk of
open markets and investment returns. Their discussions of Third
World business ventures smack of Western arrogance and willful
ignorance of real world complexities. It's the kind of hollow
discourse that allows a scam like Vincent's to work: meaningless
communication generates meaningless transactions.
This pessimistic worldview casts a pall over the movie. The
liquid sadness of Vincent's eyes portends the inevitable
collapse of his scheme. Driving down the drab highways of
eastern France in winter, at once liberated by and trapped in
his car, Vincent is literally a man adrift. Cantet frequently
shows the dimly lit road from Vincent's point of view,
underscoring our sense of a man feeling his way through the
dark. The movie's penultimate scene elaborates on this visual
motif, as a distraught Vincent swerves into a field and walks
out of his car, into the darkness, where the headlights can't
catch him.
Chafing at the demands imposed on the breadwinner, Vincent
fabricates a carefree lifestyle that doesn't surrender the perks
of his bourgeois background or his position as the benevolent
paterfamilias. Early in the movie, there's a touching scene
between Vincent and his wife, Muriel (Karin Viard), where she
complains about the rut she's in. Vincent sympathizes with her
completely, and tells her that his new job will allow her to
quit hers so she can pursue her long-sought degree. The impulse
behind Vincent's offer is oddly sweet and utopian -- the fact
that there is no new job doesn't stop him from offering her a
glimpse of liberation.
As in Cantet's debut feature, Human Resources (2000), the
dynamics of a father-son relationship form a significant subtext
in Time Out. Vincent lives forever in the shadow of his
father. This insecurity is apparent in Vincent's relations with
his eldest son, whom he spoils with generous handouts. An
impromptu gift of 500 francs to his son brings to mind a check
that his father has previously written for him. When Vincent
buys an SUV, one gets the sense that he does it as much for his
son's approbation as for his own enjoyment. (The son promptly
shoots down the purchase as less extravagant than that made
recently by a friend's father.)
A keen sense of inadequacy -- as a man, father, and son --
underlies Vincent's quiet, momentous insurrection against the
working world. It's not for nothing that early images of Vincent
feature random kids running around in the frame -- they're
subliminal emblems of the freedom he desires. His own
childishness becomes clear when his story finally catches up
with him, at home, in front of his family. Trying to avoid a
talking-to from his father, he climbs out of a bedroom window, a
poignant evocation of his regression.
But Time Out doesn't end with Vincent's escape. In a
shattering coda, we see a "rehabilitated" Vincent getting back
on the horse for another go. He oozes confidence and eagerness
for a new job, in an interview arranged for him by his father.
Vincent tells his prospective employer, "I'm not afraid," but
his faltering smile barely masks the falsity and the familiarity
of the sentiment: it's the forced enthusiasm for a job one
doesn't want. Time Out may start with a lie, but it ends
with a bigger one. The tragedy, Cantet suggests, is that it's a
lie we all, sooner or later, will have to make.
— 18 April 2002
