Vincent loses his job. He cannot bear to confess this to his wife and
children, so he invents another one, and the fictional job takes up more
of his time than his family does. It is hard work to spend all day
producing the illusion of accomplishment out of thin air. Ask anyone from
Enron. The new film "Time Out" is about modern forms of work that exist
only because we say they do. Those best-sellers about modern management
techniques are hilarious because the only things that many managers
actually manage are their techniques.
Free from his job, Vincent is seduced by the pleasure of getting in his
car and just driving around. He lives in France, near the Swiss border,
and one day he wanders into an office building in Switzerland, eavesdrops
on some of the employees, picks up a brochure, and tells his relatives he
works in a place like this. It's an agency associated with the United
Nations, and as nearly as I can tell, its purpose is to train managers who
can go to Africa and train managers. This is about right. The best way to
get a job through a program designed to find you a job is to get a job
with the program.
Vincent, played by the sad-eyed, sincere Aurelien
Recoing, is not a con
man so much as a pragmatist who realizes that since his job exists mostly
in his mind anyway, he might as well eliminate the middleman, his
employer. He begins taking long overnight trips, sleeping in his car,
finding his breakfast at cold, lonely roadside diners at daybreak. He
calls his wife frequently with progress reports: the meeting went well,
the client needs more time, the pro-ject team is assembling tomorrow, he
has a new assignment. Since he has not figured out how to live without
money, he persuades friends and relatives to invest in his fictional
company, and uses that money to live on.
You would think the movie would be about how this life of deception,
these lonely weeks on the road, wear him down. Actually, he seems more
worn out by the experience of interacting with his family during his
visits at home. His wife, Muriel (Karin Viard), a schoolteacher, suspects
that something is not quite convincing about this new job. What throws her
off is that there was something not quite convincing about his old job,
too. Vincent's father is the kind of man who, because he can never be
pleased, does not distinguish between one form of displeasure and another.
Vincent's children are not much interested in their dad's work.
In his travels Vincent encounters Jean-Michel (Serge
Livrozet), who
spots him for a phony and might have a place in his organization for the
right kind of phony. Jean-Michel imports fake brand-name items. What he
does is not legal, but it does involve the sale and delivery of actual
physical goods. He is more honest than those who simply exchange
theoretical goods; Jean-Michel sells fake Guccis, Enron sells fake
dollars.
"Time Out" is the second film by Laurent
Cantet, whose first was "Human
Resources" (2000), about a young man from a working-class family who goes
off to college and returns as the human resources manager at the factory
where his father has worked all of his life as a punch-press operator. One
of the son's tasks is to lay off many employees, including his father. The
father heartbreakingly returns to his machine even after being fired,
because he cannot imagine his life without a job. Vincent in a way is
worse off. His job is irrelevant to his life. I admire the closing scenes
of the film, which seem to ask whether our civilization offers a cure for
Vincent's complaint.
From
Chicago
Sun-Times
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