Laurent Cantet is possibly the most mature and unshowy of the younger French directors. He has built on the success of Human Resources, his memorable debut feature, with Time Out, the story of a married man who loses his job and constructs a fictitious one to save his wife and three children embarrassment. In a stunning performance from Aurélian Recoing, he leads an intricately manufactured double life before the inevitable moment of discovery and catharsis.
The film is based on the true case of a man who led such a life and in the end killed his family. But it eschews the violence and gives us instead an intimate portrait of someone who gains a sense of freedom with his deception, along with his feelings of guilt and inadequacy. With the world on the edge of recession, the film, like Human Resources, seems a very pertinent one.
It's the detail, psychological and otherwise, that counts. The man leaves every morning for work, and even constructs business trips before eventually fabricating a new job for a Swiss firm working for the UN in Geneva. He gets money from his father (Jean-Pierre Mangeot) to buy a flat near this company, and then concocts an investment scheme to pay his expenses. It works well until an old friend with little money puts in all his savings.
Meanwhile, the man sleeps in his car, wanders around parks, visits cafes and even goes into the offices of the firm for whom he is supposed to be working in Geneva, just to familiarise himself with the atmosphere. Gradually, however, a series of small humiliations, capped by being thrown out of the firm's workplace, make keeping the lie together virtually impossible.
Cantet orchestrates all this with great subtlety, almost making you will his central character to succeed in his deceptions, even as you wonder what possessed him to begin them in the first place. Recoing's performance is as skilled as the direction; he suggests someone who may, in fact, be incapable of surviving the rat race, but finds himself trapped by his life outside it. Karin Viard as his unsuspecting wife is almost as good.
Apart from being a film-maker who seems to know exactly what he is doing, Cantet's human sympathies and his clearly oppositional view of the way we are forced to conform make both Human Resources and Time Out the kind of films we rarely see these days. They are the opposite of spectacular; they resonate in the mind more than the eye.
