Genre: Drama

Director: Laurent Cantet

Time Out deals with a subject that is as paramount in our lives as conspicuously absent in cinema, literature and the arts: work.  I’ve often wondered what’s the reason behind the exclusion of work from the discourse of the arts, and I think Time Out offers a possible answer.

Vincent Renault (Aurielien Recoing) feels that his job is suffocating him. So, instead of going to his business meetings, he drives his car for miles, singing away at the music on the radio and letting his thoughts drift, with a childish smile on his face. Eventually, he’s fired but, instead of telling his family and friends, he lies - he says he left his job as a manager for an exciting career with the UN in Geneva. He even goes there and sneaks in the UN’s building with a group of executives, well disguised in his businessman suite. He walks down the corridors paved with marble, looking at people in their luxurious offices and listening to their conversations about poverty in Africa.  He gathers the material to build the wonderful imaginary life he will bring back home.

Soon enough, though, he realizes he’s not safe.  In the UN building, a security guard notices his strange behaviour and asks him to leave and, while he’s sleeping in the parking lot of a hotel, the night watchman kicks him out rudely.  Reality is chasing him.

When he doesn’t drive, Vincent spends his time in the hall of a soulless hotel.  Here, he tricks some naïve friends into investing their savings in a business he’s supposed to manage.  But a sly character, an ex convict who lives on a permanent basis in the hotel, has been observing him - he approaches Vincent and corners him.  Vincent feels trapped - he has a panic attack.

And his story slowly falls apart his wife finds out he’s been fired, and his children look at him like he was a stranger, almost scared of him.  He tries to explain to his wife, whom he dearly loves, how he feels - the life he leads is perverse, and that makes lying easy, he says; and, while he’s afraid to disappoint, sometimes he doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to do, nor what’s expected of him.  But his effort to communicate fails.  His family don’t understand, and the only way to avoid loosing them is to loose himself again. 

Time Out states that there isn’t an alternative to this reality, in which work is what defines us to the eyes of the others but, very often, alienates us from ourselves.  So, we either lie to the others or to ourselves.  Most of our existence is predefined; we live as we are supposed to live, without the freedom of taking time out to discover what we really are or want to be.  In this scenario, even love and friendship become means of social control: they keep us in our place, a place we often haven’t chosen.

While during the movie we might think that it’s Vincent to be alienated from himself and ‘reality’, at the end we might have the doubt that it’s, instead, ‘reality’ to be alienating – or “perverse”, as Vincent says.

Finally, to go back to the initial question of why work is not dealt with in cinema and the arts, a possible answer is: because these days art is entertainment, an escape from the ‘reality’ we often feel changed in. So, if you want some entertainment, don’t watch Time Out: it could make you think…

Reviewed by Claudia Sandroni, Premier Movie Reviews 2007

Aurélien Recoing

Karin Viard

Serge Livrozet

Jean-Pierre Mangeot

Monique Mangeot

Nicolas Kalsch

Marie Cantet

Félix Cantet

Olivier Lejoubioux

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