Workingman's Dead

Time Out (L'Emploi du Temps)Written and directed by Laurent Cantet A ThinkFilm release Opens Friday at Ritz East

Typically, American movies treat unemployment as an individual problem: So-and-so has lost his job, and he needs to find money, quick, so he can make the last down payment on the family ranch, or spring for that fancy dinner where he’ll propose to his girlfriend. The fact that people lose their jobs, fairly or unfairly, is approached as a fact of life, and underlaid with a particular strain of the American dream: the idea that those who go down must (or at least can) rise up, that failure is only ever temporary.

Clearly, such jubilant fatalism has yet to set in among the French. Perhaps the most bracing aspect of Laurent Cantet's Time Out (L'Emploi du Temps) is its steadfast refusal to shrug its shoulders. There's nothing unusual about its protagonist's predicament: Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) is a consultant who, when we first see him, is sleeping in his car. It gradually emerges that he has lost his job some time in the recent past, and, for reasons that are explained only by Recoing's eyes, he's too ashamed to tell his family or any of his friends. In a series of subterfuges made possible only by cellular phones and his own desperately quick thinking, Vincent concocts an alternate history for himself: He wasn't fired, he quit, and only to take a better job, one which requires him to be out of the country for days at a stretch. He may be sleeping in his SUV (a neat inversion of that status symbol's function), but whenever his cell phone rings, he's just about to rush off to a meeting, or he can't talk because he has to be in Marseilles in 45 minutes.

What's special about Time Out is the way Cantet uses Vincent's situation to get at social problems, while rarely straying from the first-person point of view. Cantet's Human Resources used a more conventional approach, allowing other characters to kibitz on the conversation, but since no one but Vincent knows his true predicament, any comment has to be provided by the audience. A friend from Vincent's former job who persists in calling Vincent's house provides fuel for the plot but little understanding; the only person who truly understands his plight is a small-time smuggler (Serge Livrozet) who was a political hanger-on before scandal drove him underground. But for most of the film, we are trapped inside Vincent's head, which becomes an increasingly disturbing place to be. At first, he wears roll-neck sweaters and doesn't bother to shave, but as his fictitious job takes on a life of its own, he begins to dress the part, even when he isn't conning old schoolmates into "investing" in his new venture. (Their money buys him time but no peace.) We're sucked into an eddy of guilt and deceit, and it's no more possible for us than for Vincent to say how we got there.

The problem, we begin to see, is not that Vincent is out of a job -- it's clear at several points that he could find employment without much trouble. It has to do with the fact that so much of his identity is wrapped up in his place of employment. Even before he was fired, we're told, Vincent's enthusiasm had started to flag (as anyone's might after 11 years at the same consulting firm). But admitting that he was fired, even from a job he didn't like, is an impossible option. Cantet doesn't psychologize or explain Vincent's paralyzing reluctance, which is why, even though Time Out is essentially only about him, we're never encouraged to see it as just Vincent's problem.

For all its heart-rending drama, Time Out is essentially romantic, both in its insistence that Vincent is stranded rather than deluded and in its persistent return to the strain that Vincent's deception puts on his family, particularly his faithful but confounded wife (Karin Viard). In a haunting sequence, Vincent finally accedes to her requests to see the apartment he's purchased in Switzerland -- he hasn't of course, but the excuse was handy for a large loan from his father -- but he switches at the last minute and spirits her off to a cabin in the snowy woods. As they trudge through the dazzlingly white plains, the two are separated, and fog obscures the distance between them. Vincent hesitates, then looks as if he's about to keep walking, then turns and sprints to find his wife calmly standing there. "Did you think you'd lost me?" she asks.

He hasn't, of course, and it's interesting to reflect that, for all its progressive politics, Time Out finally falls back on good old-fashioned family values. But though Vincent finally returns to a semblance of a supposedly normal life, we're left to wonder if that's a victory or just another defeat. When he looks into the camera and says, "I'm not scared," you don't believe him for a second.

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