White collared
Time Out's tale of existential dread takes the starch out of the executive career.

By David Fear

WHEN MOST OF San Francisco's dot-company workers were "phased out" of employment, you couldn't walk into a café or bistro without bumping into former office foosball champions-CFOs whiling away their now-free days over a laptop, chattering optimistically about the next lucrative "capital venture" just around the corner. Some of these folks couldn't have described their jobs a year before ("I'm sort of a content controller-associate code co-coordinator, I guess ..."); bereft of a schedule or a function, some of them could only cling to flimsy notions of past glories or future windfalls. When an identity forged through titles and purposes begins free-falling, people will cling to anything they can find.

What one does for a living is such a cornerstone of identity that, once it's removed, it's easy for existential dread to creep in and lead to extremes. For the hero of the psychodrama Time Out, it's even easier to bask in denial. Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) was a consultant at a business firm before getting the axe. He doesn't have the heart to tell his family or friends the truth, however, so he spends his days cruising around and crashing real places of work. The illusion of harried business-as-usual is maintained by cell phone dispatches detailing late workdays from his "offices": a playground, a parking lot, the passenger seat of his car.

Under pressure from his father to reveal the truth behind cryptic comments about changing jobs, Vincent makes up a story about accepting an important position at the United Nations. He's convincing enough to bullshit some old friends into investing in alleged hush-hush business deals his "position" has given him information on – he's stolen files on third-world markets from a Swiss office – and he pockets their cash to fuel his twilight existence. He hooks up with a petty peddler (real-life ex-con and scene stealer Serge Livrozet) of brand-name copies, happy to be working even an illicit occupation. Spiraling deeper, he manages to convince himself that his façade is still holding up even while the cracks turn to chasms. It's just a matter of time before the lie he's living catches up to him.

Vincent's fictional descent into a fugue life has a true-to-life antecedent in the story of Jean-Claude Romand, a French gentleman who for 18 years convinced those close to him that he held an important position at the World Health Organization. Romand ended up killing his parents, mistress, and entire family when his ruse was exposed, causing quite le scandale tabloid in Europe.

French filmmaker Laurent Cantet (Human Resources), however, couldn't care less about docudramatizing Romand's tale. Preoccupied with labor's empowering effect, he's much more interested in how people will go to absurd, deceitful ends to maintain a semblance of self once their sense of security is threatened. One of the most heartbreaking scenes finds a former coworker asking Vincent why he hasn't returned his calls; his friend knows of several places ready to hire Vincent on the spot. Even when offered a way out, Vincent can't save himself. For him, the illusion of dignity is better than admitting anything is wrong.

What makes Time Out so remarkable and unsettling is the pervading sense of Antonioni-like internal/external isolation in even the simplest of scenes. Framed behind windows looking out onto barren environments or into exclusive office spaces, Recoing's beneath-the-radar performance plays out against silent, washed-out backdrops suggesting entrapment. When he's allowed to roam through open landscapes, Vincent is virtually engulfed by the space around him: snow-blown plains that renders him a speck, the inky blackness of a nighttime field he dazedly stumbles through after the proverbial jig is finally up.

The ambiguously "happy" ending Cantet leaves you with initially seems at odds with the film before it, until Recoing's reading of the last line, "I'm not afraid," and his expression hint at an even more fatalistic future. It might be a delusional hallucination before the abyss, or worse, that his malaise is really just about to begin. Either way, the alleged life preserver thrown to our hero still ends up haunting you as the credits roll. It's impossible to escape the fact that, job or no, it's only a matter of time before a greater social disintegration starts tick, tick, ticking away again. In Time Out's world of capitalistic soul-sucking, even your redemption comes with a price.

'Time Out' opens Fri/10 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.