Time Out

14/06/2026

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Images of Employment

Let us start with a quote. Laurent Cantet says, “to an extent—the women in Vers le Sud [Heading South] are searching for a place in the world, and a way of accepting themselves, a little like Vincent in L’Emploi du Temps [Time Out]. I feel I’m looking at people who do not have an appropriate place to themselves. As a result they accept to wear a mask, a social mask that allows them to play the game, to be acceptable to themselves and to others.” (Cineaste) The interviewer Emilie Bickerton has earlier introduced the discussion by saying, “Cantet’s comparative conservativism makes him a maverick in today’s French film scene. Unlike his peers, for example, Noé, Breillat, Dumont, and Denis, the route of extreme cinema has not tempted him. He inclines toward films that make sense of human relations and psychology.” This is especially conspicuous if we think about where Cantet could have taken Time Out. It is based loosely on a case that Emmanuel Carrere wrote so well about in The Adversary, but while Nicole Garcia’s adaptation of the book (with the same name) followed closely the case and Carrere’s work, as it descended into violence, Cantet’s adaptation pulls back, seeing in central character Vincent’s escape from the world of work a temporary hiatus rather than a lie that has been accumulated over many years. In the case of Carrere’s book and Garcia’s film, we have a man who pretended to have passed his exams and, for twenty-odd years, passed himself off as a doctor. In Cantet’s film, Vincent is fired from his job months before the film starts, and claims to his family and friends that he is now working for the World Health Organisation in Geneva. What he is actually doing is hanging out in motorway cafes and sleeping wherever he can in his car. He also starts accessing money from family and friends with investment schemes that offer high-interest returns.
Taking into account Cantet’s comment and Bickerton’s too, the director chooses to turn away from the lurid, all the better to interrogate the world of work and its role in our identities. This isn’t to attack Carrere’s brilliant book, nor condemn Garcia’s efficient adaptation, but we can see that Cantet, in much of his work, has been concerned with questions of employment around the turn of the century. Carrere intricately explores how an identity can form over so many years based on so many lies, saying “to skip your exams and then claim you’ve passed them, that’s not a bold bluff with some chance of success, a gambler’s double or nothing: you can only get swiftly caught in shame and ridicule, which is what he must have feared more than anything else in the world.” (The Adversary) Rather than facing this humiliation, Romand kept the lie going for eighteen years and then killed his immediate family and his parents rather than be found out and have to face their eyes upon him. “…Year after year, harbouring his absurd secret that he could confide to no one and that no one should learn on pain of death.” Usually, such a notion that nobody should hear about something on pain of death is hyperbole; Romand made the term literal. Yet Cantet refuses the melodrama of the case, even though at the time French filmmakers were offering numerous examples of violent release, with James Quandt saying “the critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the wilfully transgressive by directors like Francois Ozon, Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux…Dumont.” In their introduction to a series of essays (including Quandt’s) on this extremity in European film, Tanya C. Horeck and Tina Kendall say “reports of fainting, vomiting and mass walkouts have consistently characterised the reception of this group of art-house films, whose brutal and visceral images appear designed to shock or provoke the spectator.”  (The New Extremism in Cinema)
We might wonder why Cantet backed away from such violence, and find it partly in Cantet’s comment, and more generally in a body of work that is often concerned with employment - after all, Cantet’s first film was called Human Resources, and he won the Palme d’Or for a film, The Class, all about the educational environment, a film without any cuts away to people’s home lives as he focuses on the labour of the classroom. A more recent film is called The Workshop. Speaking of Human Resources, he says, “I wanted to film in a factory because you almost never see factories in a movie. I think nobody wants to see that part of society, because the life of people in the factories is so hard that I think nobody wants to know that.” (World Socialist Website) Cantet exaggerates his case, but he more than makes a point. There have been plenty of films showing factory settings (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Chronicle of a Summer, Tout va Bien, even so bourgeois a film as Claude Sautet’s Vincent, Francois Paul and the Others). However, it is still rare enough, and few contemporary directors have interrogated the place of work in our lives more than Cantet has in the last couple of decades.
Yet it’s as though what especially interests him in Time Out is the world of work as a game people play, a mask people wear, as though to lose work would be to lose one’s identity, and thus Vincent’s purpose isn’t to find work, but to sustain in the eyes of others the image they have of him as a particular type of worker. He is a man who wears a suit, so what matters more is the continuous wearing of that suit rather than the continuation of the employment; thus, better to find yourself getting friends to invest in your non-existent investment project than owning up to your unemployment and losing that status. From this perspective, there are a couple of key scenes, the first with an old friend, Nono, and another with a new one. In the first, Nono is a musician living in a compact high-rise flat with his wife and child. The wife works, Nono stays at home, looks after their daughter, and concentrates on his music. He seems happy, and his wife no less so — she likes her job; why shouldn’t she be the breadwinner? In the other, his new-found friend Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet) asks if he is claiming unemployment benefit. Vincent says he hasn’t got round to it, with an expression on his face that suggests neither will he. The mask would then slip, even if his straitened financial circumstances were alleviated. In France, a former employee gets a percentage of their salary rather than a flat rate as in the UK. Vincent would be worse off unemployed, of course, but not catastrophically so. Jean-Michel knows a lot about masks, and partly perhaps why Vincent interests him, why he tries to befriend him, and also why he offers him a job. Jean-Michel is a former prisoner who remains a criminal and who can see through Vincent. Thus, Vincent can open up to him as though he is looking for a bit of transparency in his life, and finds it in someone who knows where to look.
Cantet finds a visual correlative for this sense of general alienation in Vincent’s existence by showing him frequently behind glass or looking into windows. The film’s opening shows him huddled in his car as we see the windscreen, and a bus pulling up as the camera reveals he has slept in a car park. A little later, he is speaking to his wife, Muriel (Karin Viard), and, as he sits at a cafe high table, we see the motorway through glass behind him. After, we then see him once again fall asleep in his car, viewed from the outside of the vehicle as he seems cocooned in glass. Later, he is driving through the streets, and we notice him viewing the world through his windscreen as though the car is the high-speed hermitage the Australian poet Les Murray once proposed. The film shortly afterwards shows him driving past a building almost entirely made of glass. It turns out to be the WHO headquarters in Geneva. When he gets out of the car, the film allows us to see part of his smeared reflection in the windscreen before cutting to Vincent looking up and seeing not just the glass windows, but the glass interior walls that would partition one office from another, and allow everything to appear transparent.
Is there any wonder why someone might seek a little opacity in this obsessively transparent world? While we might not wish to reduce the film to the symbolic, ticking off images that constantly play up the presence of glass, it is worth pursuing this image structure if we are to seek an understanding of the film that goes beyond its visual mastery. While we’ve noted many French films of the early 2000s played up the violent, this was partly because they wanted to register fragility hyperbolically. Whether it was the terrible rape and fire extinguisher murder in Irreversible, the cannibalistic dimension to Trouble Every Day, A Ma soeur’s car park murders, or the consistent, almost abstract brutality of La vie nouvelle, French filmmakers were using shock tactics all the better to question the complacent notion that Western nations were impervious to the sort of terrors commonly evident in other parts of the world. Yet this shock was given unequivocal form at the same time with the attacks on 9/11, as though, while Hollywood during roughly the same period was preoccupied with showing huge explosions as the US was under attack (Armageddon, Pearl Harbour), the French films were more interested in showing the more intimate feelings of vulnerability. They may have been understated by Hollywood’s standards, but they were still overstated by the nuance and subtlety usually expected of French film.
That would be for another debate, but Cantet’s work insists on a fragility that needn’t become shocking. It instead seeks to permeate. The glass in the film isn’t there to be shattered, as in many an action movie, but to remain a constant, distancing presence. Near the end, when Vincent returns home, he knows he cannot retain the lie for much longer, and we see him approaching the house’s facade. He is filmed from behind as he moves towards the entrance, and we notice the patio windows in front of him, and inside, his wife and one of his kids. It is a shot that lasts around thirty seconds and is accompanied by Jocelyn Pook’s throbbing, minimalist, yet lush score, with the violin capturing well the yearning a man might feel for all he is in danger of losing. It suggests a tragedy foretold, though not an inevitable violence, as the film resists the very story upon which it is predicated. Vincent doesn’t try to take his life, nor does he murder his family. He does something more terrible: he looks for another corporate job as the film jumps forward in time, showing Vincent attending an interview. Julian Allen reckons this is a fate worse than death: “Cantet has far worse in store for us. From the anxiety of the darkness comes the horror of broad daylight, as we are presented with a final coda to freeze the blood.” (Reverse Shot) The camera slowly zooms in on Vincent’s face as the interviewer, offscreen, says there will be many challenges. Vincent’s personal investment will be required, as the interviewer says he doesn’t want to underestimate the challenges. “But I’m not scared”, Vincent says, while we might see on his face, based on the awareness we now have of him, that he is probably terrified, wondering if he will be able to remain in such a position after experiencing freedom, however fraught. Allen says, “having endured many years of the rat race first hand, I was overwhelmed on first viewing by its subtle observational power and the lyricism with which it cloaks its rage”. This critic’s confession captures an aspect of a horror worse than death he invokes.
This is an interesting point, because cinematically, death is not the worst thing that can happen to people: if it were, many a film that contains death would be incapable of the uplift it manages to invoke. Even films where the central character dies, even films where the central characters take their own lives indirectly, are often less bleak than Time Out. Often this is because the deaths are sacrificial or honourable. Children of Men, Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart and Titanic are about saving others’ lives (or fighting for one’s country), even if it means to the detriment of one’s own existence; other films where the central character dies are often about preserving one’s honour, however perversely, as in Le Samourai, Bonnie and Clyde, and Cool Hand Luke. Obviously, films of suicide or self-destruction (Le fou follet, The Hours, Leaving Las Vegas, Last Days) can be very pessimistic, but that is because of the despair more than the death, and this is what Time Out insists upon. Central to this bleakness is probably the permeative effect and the simple, almost facetious fact that while watching a film one can show fellow feeling towards a character’s depression, their anxiety, their grief — death is, finally, inalienable. Cantet seems to use this fact to say that Vincent will not leave this world, but will continue to be suffocated by its expectations and demands, just as many in the audience will feel that they too are caught in an employment they cannot quite accept, nor one they can quite escape. What In his review, Allen expresses the living death that work can be for many who can’t find a way out of it.
If so many films in France around the moment of Time Out’s release attended to brutality and death, extreme violence and its extreme presentation, then from a certain perspective, rather than facing reality, they were turning against it; hyperbolising the deed, but consequently denying the despair as despair. Around the same time as Cantet’s film, numerous employees at French Telecom were dealing with an intolerable work situation. “The court examined 39 cases of employees, 19 of whom had taken their own lives and 12 who had attempted to. The others had lived with depression or had been otherwise unable to work. It happened during a major restructuring of the company that affected thousands of employees.” (BBC) France Telecom was far from alone. “Because”, Sarah Waters notes, “suicide is legally recognised in France as a ‘workplace accident’, there have been scores of successful litigation cases won by families of suicidal individuals against companies” (‘Suicide Voices: Testimonies of trauma in the French Workplace’) This would include Renault, and, like France-Telecom, the equally government-owned La Poste, ironically caught up in its own neo-liberal programme of reform. By turning away from the exceptional nature of the Romand case, by refusing to be caught in the representational violence of much French cinema in the early 2000s, Cantet more clearly attends to the quotidian misery of many a French employee, even if, paradoxically, Vincent has no job at all throughout the film, except for his brief employment with Jean-Michel. Yet as Allen says, “he is faking, selling, persuading. The subtlety of this indictment is remarkable—the reason we don’t need to see the job Vincent used to do, is because it would too closely resemble the fake job he is (not) doing now.” (Reverse Shot)
What seems to interest Cantet is the slow suicide of a compromised life that can see no other options. Whether this is an attack on capitalism, on neo-liberalism or corporate management, or a comment on one man’s inability to find for himself a space within modern society, Cantet keeps categorical critique in abeyance, perhaps because he shows Nono has found a way out of the system. He may stay at home looking after their daughter, but he and his wife only have one child (Vincent has three), and their home is a modest dwelling next to Vincent’s large detached abode with its ample garden. We see fragments of Vincent’s house throughout the film, but it isn’t until near the end that we see its full size, in the wake of seeing his friend’s compact place. Cantet brings out the contrast well. When Vincent looks in from a distance at Nono’s flat, he is seeing a small, potentially cramped apartment, but what we see through the windows is a family chatting and laughing  as Nino continues into his studio. The flat certainly doesn’t look big, though it has space enough, space for three bedrooms, with the third, the studio. We might wonder what exactly Vincent is thinking when he looks in and on. The shots of him looking, standing on an embankment in semi-darkness, carry with them a revenant’s presence: a person as if returning from the dead looking on at the living. Vincent has removed himself from society by losing his job and by keeping mum about it, but he is still, inevitably, emotionally attached to it in the love he clearly shows towards his wife and children. When he looks in on the friend, he sees someone who has escaped the pressures of life without removing himself from the joys of domesticity.
Can Vincent return to reality himself, and what are the options in doing so? The film offers the expectation that he will take his life, perhaps those of his family, which would be close to the Romand case. But the film’s irony rests on Vincent doing no such thing and returning to the world again on its terms and not his own. The difference between Vincent and Nono is that a situation becomes vacant; Vincent will try to fill it, no matter the vacancy he feels in himself. If this is not at all a happy ending, it is because this is a capitulation rather than a voluntary return. Few won’t be relieved he hasn’t taken his life, and relieved too, and even more so, that he hasn’t killed his family. But the relief that may initially accompany the closing scene of the interview is quickly countered by the dread we see on Vincent’s face by the end of it. He is also still lying to people. When the interviewer asks him why he left his previous job after 11 years working for the company, Vincent says he felt he was going round in circles; he didn’t see any new opportunities. One can’t deny it would be difficult for Vincent to tell the truth in such circumstances: how can he say he spent several months wandering around France and Switzerland pretending he was still gainfully employed? It probably wouldn’t have been easy to say either that, after losing his last job, he needed time out, and he needed this time to recollect his thoughts, to discover what he wanted to do with his life. Instead, we see him once again telling stories, fabricating a perception of himself that will appeal to others, and watch as the film moves from a shot of the interviewer asking him questions, back to Vincent, and then back to the interviewer’s face, as the interviewer says : “your father says you’re not short of ambition.” The father’s comments may not have been dishonest, but they could be taken ironically; Vincent’s plans for major investment in Africa, however fraudulent, were ambitious. It also suggests that the reason Vincent has got the interview rests on his father’s reputation, and that the family has persuaded him to pursue this post. The film cuts back to Vincent as the camera slowly moves in on his face while Pook’s music comes in. The interviewer continues talking about the job, but the film suggests Vincent isn’t listening, as the music is as loud as the interviewer’s words. We may assume that Vincent is once again getting caught in a trap, a trap Cantet suggests is hardly Vincent’s alone, as Pook’s distressing score continues over the end credits. While music bleeding out from the diegesis over the closing titles is common enough, far less so is someone still speaking as the end credits come in. What he says seems irrelevant to what he feels, and what he feels the music instead conveys. Is there no escape, not just for Vincent but for numerous others too, who will be going to work on Monday morning aware that they are as incarcerated in their employment expectations as Vincent is in his?
        Jean-Claude Romand killed his family in January 1993; the numerous workplace deaths in France Telecom happened in a two-year period, twenty years later. We can note that “more than 30 employees of France Telecom committed suicide between 2008 and 2010 as reorganisation efforts to make the former monopoly more competitive contributed to workers’ psychological issues, a labor union said at the time.” (Irish Times) Cantet’s film manages to anticipate the future by drawing upon the past (the Romand case), ignoring the present (the French yen for depicting extreme violence), and anticipating the future (in the French Telecom and other workplace tragedies). One mustn’t exaggerate this foresight, nor see in the film what isn’t there: there is no sense that Vincent has been the subject of bullying, even if we might wonder precisely how and why he lost his job. However, when at the end of the film, the interviewer says “to be clear I am not pressurising you”, as Vincent replies “I’m not scared”, we might wonder if this is the state of corporate environments: that people are both pressured and frightened. The interviewer may not be pressuring him yet, but Vincent can expect plenty of it, perhaps, if he takes the job. The look on Vincent’s face indicates he is frightened, but of what we cannot easily discern. If the interviewer isn’t pressurising him, will his wife and father, in their no doubt loving way, be doing so by expecting him to take the job in the first place?
In retreating from the extremity of its potential subject matter, the film instead muses much more over what work is. What is it to be employed or unemployed, and how much do we choose the labour we offer? “…I didn’t want to make a film”, Cantet says, “about an exceptional, psychotic character.” But equally, he did want to make a film about the question of employment, a film that might wonder about “the prospect of a job as akin to slavery.” (Cineaste) When Cantet says people first reading the script saw a happy ending, he wanted to make clear in the images, in the sound, that this wasn’t so - that just because Vincent looks like he will get another job doesn’t mean he has resolved any of his problems. This is no doubt partly why we have the presence of both Nono and Jean-Michel, the one minding his own business making music; the other making a business out of goods that he smuggles into the country: he can buy them cheaply in Poland, and they sell for far more in France, but far cheaper than the price the goods would generally cost.
The casting of Jean-Michel was as thought through as the casting of Vincent, if for different reasons. If Cantet chose Aurelien Recoing for the subtlety and modulation this well-known theatre actor could convey, he went with Serge Livrozet as Jean-Michel for what he could bring to the role, predicated on his public persona. “Livrozet was a burglar when he was younger and went to prison and later, during the Seventies, became involved (together with Michel Foucault) in prisoners’ rights organizations when he got out.” Cantet sees him as a figure of the times, someone who “is a real product of the post ’68 era, although many people have forgotten him.” (Cineaste) Yet Cantet casts him as though we ought to remember, without losing sight of Livrozet as a character within the film. When Jean-Michel and Vincent sit together in a hotel room, Jean-Michel shows him images from an album, including press clippings of his time in prison.
With Nono and Jean-Michel, we have two options for living beyond the life Vincent is expected to live, but one involves a modest income and the other an illegal one. Instead, during the course of the film, Vincent chooses a hiatal existence, caught between the real world of work and the mythomanical one he creates. Bert Cardullo sees the irony: that the life he generates for himself probably requires more hard work and effort than the very job Vincent did have, that “producing this illusion of accomplishment is much more grueling and time-consuming than real or tangible work.” (Hudson Review) Cardullo earlier notes that “Time Out is a almost metaphysical contemplation of what many of us mean when we talk about work: not manual labor or factory work of the kind to be found in Cantet's first film, Human Resources (1999), but the corporate position in finance, consulting, management, and development that is hard to describe but which comfortably supports upper-middle-class European as well as American families.”  If Cardullo is right, then we are witnessing someone walking away from what in more contemporaneous and demotic terms has been called a bullshit job. It is David Graeber’s now-famous phrase to describe the various forms of labour that really don’t need to be done. “While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand.” (DavidGraeber.Org)
Perhaps Vincent loses his job less because he isn’t doing it properly, than that he recognises he doesn’t really have much of a job to do, and acknowledging that reality means inevitably he was going to lose his employment. He says that he became more engaged in the driving than the meetings, and at one moment says that sometimes he would drive hundreds of kilometres for an appointment, miss the turn off without thinking, and keep driving. Understandably, his boss was annoyed, but what seemed to annoy him the most was that Vincent “no longer had the company spirit”, as though the company spirit was antithetical to the wandering soul Vincent had become.  He is explaining this to Jean-Michel in the car, at night, as he gets involved in Jean-Michel’s goods-trafficking business. The film plays up the intimacy between these two men, confined in a car as they talk side by side, aware that the best conversations often take place when people are moving through space, looking in the same direction rather than sitting opposite each other. The lighting could be out of Rembrandt, with Vincent and Jean-Michel lit amongst the surrounding darkness. A real friendship is developing, even as the very exploitation of friendships has allowed Vincent to survive financially by exploiting the goodwill of the people he knows.
   However, it is as though, in keeping his unemployed status to himself, Vincent has created a void of truth that lies can occupy just as easily as non-disclosure. Instead of communicating with his friends and family, he starts to exploit them in a perfect metaphor, perhaps for the exploitation that Vincent may be offering when he involves them in putting their money into Africa — investing in the continent, a capitalist would insist; perhaps taking advantage of their resources at a cheap rate, others might say. Jean-Michel may well be doing the latter as well, as he buys cheap and sells high, seeing in Poland the possibilities in low-cost labour, just as Vincent can convince his friends that Africa is a burgeoning market ripe for rich returns. Such a position would be taking us away from the film’s preoccupations, and we should keep in mind that Cantet is not chiefly interested in the political dimension. “Ken Loach is a militant. I’m not. I ask a number of questions in my films, but I never answer one of them. I’m not interested in didacticism.” (Cineaste) There may be a place for Ken Loach’s political purposefulness, but it would be unfair to Cantet to insist we find it in one of his films. He instead seeks to understand not the importance of labour and the exploitation of the working classes, but to wonder what work happens to be and how it defines our lives. As he says, “Most people see the idea of work as a value initself. It’s hard to convince people that some people are meant for something other than work.”
It might be fairer to say the film is finally about consumerism rather than labour, and this is what Graeber points out in his article: “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.” What Keynes hadn’t factored in, though, was people’s need for things. “Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.” Graeber goes on to question this line as he notes: “Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.” What we have created are numerous useless jobs, and these would include for Graeber, the sort of work Vincent does, as he says “it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.” (DavidGraeber.Org) Whether Cantet would agree with the late, radical anthropologist, who became famous for his involvement in Occupy Wall Street, what the film seems to show is that we have gone beyond consumerism to the creation of appearances, from the sort of material consumption so brilliantly explored in the French context by Georges Perec’s Things and Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society, towards what Baudrillard would later call the simulacrum.  If Graeber is correct in assuming that we aren’t working such long hours because we are working so hard to produce the goods that we so wish to consume, but that instead we are working for the sake of appearing to have something to do, then this encapsulates an aspect of Vincent’s situation. Whether in or out of work, it doesn’t make much difference practically, only financially. He is no longer picking up a wage for doing little, doing the sort of work he no doubt did when employed, as he persuades his friends and family to invest. But now the front he must show is one based on deceit rather than self-deception. If before, like many a white-collar worker in the West, in Graeber’s take, Vincent has to fool himself into believing he is doing useful work, Vincent knows now he is lying. But he must convince others of the value of the project he is trying to sell them.
Thus, we can see the thin line between modes of deceit and, also, why we might find Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum useful. “It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of the real,” (‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’) he says, and this is echoed in Cardullo’s claim that “Cantet makes the subversive point that his protagonist is able to pull off this pretend virtuoso duplicity, because, as a manager, he was trained essentially to do nothing except manage other people — to manage his own techniques or ‘people skills,’ as it were.” (Hudson Review) Vincent moves smoothly from a bullshit job to becoming, in common parlance, a bullshitter — using the skills he used in employment all over again as an unemployed person needing cash. We can even note that the ‘jobs’ available to him through the course of the film (ripping his friends off with his scam, or ripping strangers off with Jean-Michel’s) are based on two distinct skills. The first is being a people person; someone others can trust, who can be convinced by the claims Vincent makes that he can accumulate value on people’s investments. The second is based on the ability to stay awake and drive a car. His previous job required these skills to come together; now they are separate and both based on illegality. Yet at the same time, though the trafficking of counterfeit goods is dishonest, there is honest labour in the deed, in driving from one country to another. When he is selling investments to his friends there is no honesty at all — just a simulacrum, a version of Vincent the man of finance who knows he can use the same patter all over again but without the corporate logo.
If Cantet has made a work that isn’t about the actual case, one that doesn’t lead to Vincent murdering his family, then what sort of violence does the film practice, if we can call it violence at all? There is an irony that shows, while Vincent’s scams will be devastating to the people losing their savings, he will be leaving impoverished countries alone. “From 1999 to 2002, the Kabila regime (in The Democratic Republic of Congo) ‘transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state-mining sector to private companies under its control... with no compensation or benefit for the State treasury,’ a United Nations investigation found.” (CNN) Sara Lowes reckons, “a striking aspect of colonial history in Africa is that all major colonial powers granted concessions to private companies. The primary objective of these companies was to extract natural resources in the colonies.” She says that within Africa, concessions were established in French, British, Belgian, German, and Portuguese colonies (such as  Angola, Botswana, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Gabon, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). ‘‘The concession companies were assigned powers that are typically associated with governments, such as monopoly over violence and taxation ability.” (Vox Dev) If Vincent were acting honestly in his friends’ interests, these would be the sort of investments he would be making. But instead, Africa is safe from such dubious help because Vincent has turned his job virtual: rather than merely saying that Vincent has become a liar and a fraud, better to see he is part of a broader problem than his own mythomania. Cantet might be no militant; his film does show that Vincent’s life isn’t just that of an individual a little lost, but that he is a figure of the corporate world even when he is no longer in it. As he sits in his car or in a cottage in the hills, Vincent reads about African investments: “between 1990 and 1998, there was a great deal of privatisation in South Africa, $1.4b, Ghana $769m, Nigeria, $500m…” What he will be doing with these numbers fraudulently, as he gets his friends and family to invest in not just Africa but the opening markets of Eastern Europe as well, others may well be doing so exploitatively. When Vincent says to his father that “simply put, we help create companies in developing countries…we offer financing to start up the companies, but we also follow up as executive consultants”, is this really a good Samaritan work?
Our purpose isn’t to comment on the justification or otherwise of investment in Africa and emerging markets, but we might wonder how philanthropic such investments are when what matters is the high returns generated. With the possible exception of Nono, nobody seems interested in whether this will be good for the developing country; they are preoccupied with the margin of their profit. Vincent’s purpose is to convince them of the validity of the project, and we don’t doubt that these are transferable skills: from corporate employment to ripping off friends. What the film illustrates is that, while employed, we might assume Vincent would be legally exploiting the developing world; unemployed, he is exploiting the developed world — his friends who have enough spare cash to seek a financial killing.  While there are no murders in the film, there is plenty to suggest a twofold despair. On the one hand, we have Vincent and other white-collar workers doing well for themselves, yet with little self to call their own. The first friend Vincent talks to about investing their savings, Fred (Christopher Charles) says, “doing less gets boring”, as he adds, “sometimes after work I just can’t go home…go out, feel like I did something with my day.” It is the sort of quiet lassitude, even despair, Michel Houellebecq was writing so well and scurrilously about around the same time: the sort of person who ends up medicated and prey to feelings of inadequacy, while possessing useless desires. On the other hand, there are those who remain invisible and exploited, targets of investment opportunities which are often unsuccessful enough, as investments rather than returns, for the people of these countries to become very visible indeed when they come to Europe looking for work and opportunities — just as inversely the white collar worker would at a safe distance be involved in work and opportunities in Africa. It makes sense that there are only a few black faces in Time Out, despite all the talk of the continent. We may see a black man amongst a group of whites in one boardroom meeting at the corporate building Vincent hangs out in, and a person of colour briefly seen dining at the hotel where Vincent talks to Fred, but this is a white man’s world. Africa is an absent presence, and whatever miseries inflicted or endured aren’t Vincent’s business, and thus can’t be the film’s.
It might be too much to project the violence the film eschews onto a continent it never shows us, but perhaps we can at least propose that the film countenances a permeating hostility which would be ruined by activating concrete aggression. If Vincent had turned murderous, would we have the exception proving the rule, rather than a symptomological account of white- collar ennui? This is an ennui that nevertheless may be having devastating consequences in other parts of the world as money made in the West out of the East, Africa and elsewhere, has one part of the globe juggling numbers, while other parts are juggling with their lives. It is true that numerous France Telecom workers went to extreme lengths to register their despair, but if one of them had ended their life, or one of them had gone on a murderous rampage, this wouldn’t have been perceived as an indictment of managerial practices, but perhaps only an isolated incident, saying more about the individual work than the structural approach of the firm. Vincent’s purpose is to be ordinary rather than extraordinary, and this is fundamentally different from Jean-Claude Romand, as Carrere explores him. The French writer was very understandably fascinated by someone who, for eighteen years, had hidden his life from friends and family, claimed to be working in a profession when he hadn’t even passed the exams decades earlier, and went on to kill his wife, his children and his parents, rather than face the shame of them recognising the sham. It is a story so rare that it asks many questions about the psychology of such a man.
Cantet instead makes his central character unemployed for three months and shows him finding ways to cheat friends and family with promises of high returns. Yet if the film feels permeated by violence, nevertheless, it rests on more, we might think, than expectation. When Quentin Tarantino made Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he would have known that many in the audience were aware that Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson’s gang, but he instead shows Manson and his maniacs getting slaughtered. Jacob Stalworthy called it “a revisionist fairy tale” (Independent), and much of the film’s appeal rests on knowing history and the history of Tarantino’s knowingness. Many watching Time Out would have known too that it was based on an event with a gruesome outcome. But instead of inverting it (the family killing Vincent?), Cantet symptomises it by removing the actualised violence, and wonders instead how it permeates the world he shows as a low -key tension, where people are alienated from each other, and perhaps for no better reason than it is a milieu where people are expected to exploit humans close to home or elsewhere. It is the way the world works, even if it isn’t so useful for how people work, how they tick.
There is the suggestion here that whether Vincent is stripping his friends of their resources or African nations of theirs, he is just doing business. Yet this isn’t business as production, but as extraction and abstraction. Vincent persuades people to part with their cash on a false premise, but the real premise would probably only be a different form of extortion. The African nations have little money; Western nations have need of their gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, uranium, platinum, oil and natural gas. This isn’t the place to enquire into the nature of that exploitation, of how Western (and Russian and Chinese) companies make large fortunes out of the continent’s resources. It is, however, to comprehend that, from a certain point of view, Vincent has in his fraudulent scheme with family and friends, reversed the nature of that potential exploitation, and allowed it to be an internal French problem rather than an external African one. If Jason Hickel is right that “rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones”, then better that Vincent is merely screwing over a few friends and members of his family. Hickel says, “that In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them.” (Guardian) When Vincent convinces those around him of investment opportunities, he may be lining his own pocket, but at least he isn’t pickpocketing from the developing world.
Cantet has eschewed the violent and alluded to the exploitative, and has thus neither made a film about a familial spree killer, nor about the world’s resources stripped by greedy capitalists. To have moved in either direction could have allowed him to address one of these problems clearly and yet offered a less developed approach to it. In other words, we would have comprehended the depths of the central character’s desperation, or the exploitation involved in the finance industry, an area of work that can seem to be quietly minding its own business, while noisily disrupting economies elsewhere. However, Cantet offers the subtlest of stories, a tale about a man who wonders what happens when you drop out of your life, while giving the impression to everyone that you are still living a remarkably similar existence. It manages to make us wonder about the permeating alienation of a socio-economic system based on appearances. With Vincent looking like he is going to return to work, much of his labour will be involved in sustaining an image of employment that he has been practising while unemployed. Yet in gainfully returning to the workforce, we might assume that, rather than taking advantage of his nearest and dearest, he will once more be exploiting the poorest of strangers.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Time Out

Images of Employment

Let us start with a quote. Laurent Cantet says, “to an extent—the women in Vers le Sud [Heading South] are searching for a place in the world, and a way of accepting themselves, a little like Vincent in L’Emploi du Temps [Time Out]. I feel I’m looking at people who do not have an appropriate place to themselves. As a result they accept to wear a mask, a social mask that allows them to play the game, to be acceptable to themselves and to others.” (Cineaste) The interviewer Emilie Bickerton has earlier introduced the discussion by saying, “Cantet’s comparative conservativism makes him a maverick in today’s French film scene. Unlike his peers, for example, Noé, Breillat, Dumont, and Denis, the route of extreme cinema has not tempted him. He inclines toward films that make sense of human relations and psychology.” This is especially conspicuous if we think about where Cantet could have taken Time Out. It is based loosely on a case that Emmanuel Carrere wrote so well about in The Adversary, but while Nicole Garcia’s adaptation of the book (with the same name) followed closely the case and Carrere’s work, as it descended into violence, Cantet’s adaptation pulls back, seeing in central character Vincent’s escape from the world of work a temporary hiatus rather than a lie that has been accumulated over many years. In the case of Carrere’s book and Garcia’s film, we have a man who pretended to have passed his exams and, for twenty-odd years, passed himself off as a doctor. In Cantet’s film, Vincent is fired from his job months before the film starts, and claims to his family and friends that he is now working for the World Health Organisation in Geneva. What he is actually doing is hanging out in motorway cafes and sleeping wherever he can in his car. He also starts accessing money from family and friends with investment schemes that offer high-interest returns.
Taking into account Cantet’s comment and Bickerton’s too, the director chooses to turn away from the lurid, all the better to interrogate the world of work and its role in our identities. This isn’t to attack Carrere’s brilliant book, nor condemn Garcia’s efficient adaptation, but we can see that Cantet, in much of his work, has been concerned with questions of employment around the turn of the century. Carrere intricately explores how an identity can form over so many years based on so many lies, saying “to skip your exams and then claim you’ve passed them, that’s not a bold bluff with some chance of success, a gambler’s double or nothing: you can only get swiftly caught in shame and ridicule, which is what he must have feared more than anything else in the world.” (The Adversary) Rather than facing this humiliation, Romand kept the lie going for eighteen years and then killed his immediate family and his parents rather than be found out and have to face their eyes upon him. “…Year after year, harbouring his absurd secret that he could confide to no one and that no one should learn on pain of death.” Usually, such a notion that nobody should hear about something on pain of death is hyperbole; Romand made the term literal. Yet Cantet refuses the melodrama of the case, even though at the time French filmmakers were offering numerous examples of violent release, with James Quandt saying “the critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the wilfully transgressive by directors like Francois Ozon, Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux…Dumont.” In their introduction to a series of essays (including Quandt’s) on this extremity in European film, Tanya C. Horeck and Tina Kendall say “reports of fainting, vomiting and mass walkouts have consistently characterised the reception of this group of art-house films, whose brutal and visceral images appear designed to shock or provoke the spectator.”  (The New Extremism in Cinema)
We might wonder why Cantet backed away from such violence, and find it partly in Cantet’s comment, and more generally in a body of work that is often concerned with employment - after all, Cantet’s first film was called Human Resources, and he won the Palme d’Or for a film, The Class, all about the educational environment, a film without any cuts away to people’s home lives as he focuses on the labour of the classroom. A more recent film is called The Workshop. Speaking of Human Resources, he says, “I wanted to film in a factory because you almost never see factories in a movie. I think nobody wants to see that part of society, because the life of people in the factories is so hard that I think nobody wants to know that.” (World Socialist Website) Cantet exaggerates his case, but he more than makes a point. There have been plenty of films showing factory settings (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Chronicle of a Summer, Tout va Bien, even so bourgeois a film as Claude Sautet’s Vincent, Francois Paul and the Others). However, it is still rare enough, and few contemporary directors have interrogated the place of work in our lives more than Cantet has in the last couple of decades.
Yet it’s as though what especially interests him in Time Out is the world of work as a game people play, a mask people wear, as though to lose work would be to lose one’s identity, and thus Vincent’s purpose isn’t to find work, but to sustain in the eyes of others the image they have of him as a particular type of worker. He is a man who wears a suit, so what matters more is the continuous wearing of that suit rather than the continuation of the employment; thus, better to find yourself getting friends to invest in your non-existent investment project than owning up to your unemployment and losing that status. From this perspective, there are a couple of key scenes, the first with an old friend, Nono, and another with a new one. In the first, Nono is a musician living in a compact high-rise flat with his wife and child. The wife works, Nono stays at home, looks after their daughter, and concentrates on his music. He seems happy, and his wife no less so — she likes her job; why shouldn’t she be the breadwinner? In the other, his new-found friend Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet) asks if he is claiming unemployment benefit. Vincent says he hasn’t got round to it, with an expression on his face that suggests neither will he. The mask would then slip, even if his straitened financial circumstances were alleviated. In France, a former employee gets a percentage of their salary rather than a flat rate as in the UK. Vincent would be worse off unemployed, of course, but not catastrophically so. Jean-Michel knows a lot about masks, and partly perhaps why Vincent interests him, why he tries to befriend him, and also why he offers him a job. Jean-Michel is a former prisoner who remains a criminal and who can see through Vincent. Thus, Vincent can open up to him as though he is looking for a bit of transparency in his life, and finds it in someone who knows where to look.
Cantet finds a visual correlative for this sense of general alienation in Vincent’s existence by showing him frequently behind glass or looking into windows. The film’s opening shows him huddled in his car as we see the windscreen, and a bus pulling up as the camera reveals he has slept in a car park. A little later, he is speaking to his wife, Muriel (Karin Viard), and, as he sits at a cafe high table, we see the motorway through glass behind him. After, we then see him once again fall asleep in his car, viewed from the outside of the vehicle as he seems cocooned in glass. Later, he is driving through the streets, and we notice him viewing the world through his windscreen as though the car is the high-speed hermitage the Australian poet Les Murray once proposed. The film shortly afterwards shows him driving past a building almost entirely made of glass. It turns out to be the WHO headquarters in Geneva. When he gets out of the car, the film allows us to see part of his smeared reflection in the windscreen before cutting to Vincent looking up and seeing not just the glass windows, but the glass interior walls that would partition one office from another, and allow everything to appear transparent.
Is there any wonder why someone might seek a little opacity in this obsessively transparent world? While we might not wish to reduce the film to the symbolic, ticking off images that constantly play up the presence of glass, it is worth pursuing this image structure if we are to seek an understanding of the film that goes beyond its visual mastery. While we’ve noted many French films of the early 2000s played up the violent, this was partly because they wanted to register fragility hyperbolically. Whether it was the terrible rape and fire extinguisher murder in Irreversible, the cannibalistic dimension to Trouble Every Day, A Ma soeur’s car park murders, or the consistent, almost abstract brutality of La vie nouvelle, French filmmakers were using shock tactics all the better to question the complacent notion that Western nations were impervious to the sort of terrors commonly evident in other parts of the world. Yet this shock was given unequivocal form at the same time with the attacks on 9/11, as though, while Hollywood during roughly the same period was preoccupied with showing huge explosions as the US was under attack (Armageddon, Pearl Harbour), the French films were more interested in showing the more intimate feelings of vulnerability. They may have been understated by Hollywood’s standards, but they were still overstated by the nuance and subtlety usually expected of French film.
That would be for another debate, but Cantet’s work insists on a fragility that needn’t become shocking. It instead seeks to permeate. The glass in the film isn’t there to be shattered, as in many an action movie, but to remain a constant, distancing presence. Near the end, when Vincent returns home, he knows he cannot retain the lie for much longer, and we see him approaching the house’s facade. He is filmed from behind as he moves towards the entrance, and we notice the patio windows in front of him, and inside, his wife and one of his kids. It is a shot that lasts around thirty seconds and is accompanied by Jocelyn Pook’s throbbing, minimalist, yet lush score, with the violin capturing well the yearning a man might feel for all he is in danger of losing. It suggests a tragedy foretold, though not an inevitable violence, as the film resists the very story upon which it is predicated. Vincent doesn’t try to take his life, nor does he murder his family. He does something more terrible: he looks for another corporate job as the film jumps forward in time, showing Vincent attending an interview. Julian Allen reckons this is a fate worse than death: “Cantet has far worse in store for us. From the anxiety of the darkness comes the horror of broad daylight, as we are presented with a final coda to freeze the blood.” (Reverse Shot) The camera slowly zooms in on Vincent’s face as the interviewer, offscreen, says there will be many challenges. Vincent’s personal investment will be required, as the interviewer says he doesn’t want to underestimate the challenges. “But I’m not scared”, Vincent says, while we might see on his face, based on the awareness we now have of him, that he is probably terrified, wondering if he will be able to remain in such a position after experiencing freedom, however fraught. Allen says, “having endured many years of the rat race first hand, I was overwhelmed on first viewing by its subtle observational power and the lyricism with which it cloaks its rage”. This critic’s confession captures an aspect of a horror worse than death he invokes.
This is an interesting point, because cinematically, death is not the worst thing that can happen to people: if it were, many a film that contains death would be incapable of the uplift it manages to invoke. Even films where the central character dies, even films where the central characters take their own lives indirectly, are often less bleak than Time Out. Often this is because the deaths are sacrificial or honourable. Children of Men, Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart and Titanic are about saving others’ lives (or fighting for one’s country), even if it means to the detriment of one’s own existence; other films where the central character dies are often about preserving one’s honour, however perversely, as in Le Samourai, Bonnie and Clyde, and Cool Hand Luke. Obviously, films of suicide or self-destruction (Le fou follet, The Hours, Leaving Las Vegas, Last Days) can be very pessimistic, but that is because of the despair more than the death, and this is what Time Out insists upon. Central to this bleakness is probably the permeative effect and the simple, almost facetious fact that while watching a film one can show fellow feeling towards a character’s depression, their anxiety, their grief — death is, finally, inalienable. Cantet seems to use this fact to say that Vincent will not leave this world, but will continue to be suffocated by its expectations and demands, just as many in the audience will feel that they too are caught in an employment they cannot quite accept, nor one they can quite escape. What In his review, Allen expresses the living death that work can be for many who can’t find a way out of it.
If so many films in France around the moment of Time Out’s release attended to brutality and death, extreme violence and its extreme presentation, then from a certain perspective, rather than facing reality, they were turning against it; hyperbolising the deed, but consequently denying the despair as despair. Around the same time as Cantet’s film, numerous employees at French Telecom were dealing with an intolerable work situation. “The court examined 39 cases of employees, 19 of whom had taken their own lives and 12 who had attempted to. The others had lived with depression or had been otherwise unable to work. It happened during a major restructuring of the company that affected thousands of employees.” (BBC) France Telecom was far from alone. “Because”, Sarah Waters notes, “suicide is legally recognised in France as a ‘workplace accident’, there have been scores of successful litigation cases won by families of suicidal individuals against companies” (‘Suicide Voices: Testimonies of trauma in the French Workplace’) This would include Renault, and, like France-Telecom, the equally government-owned La Poste, ironically caught up in its own neo-liberal programme of reform. By turning away from the exceptional nature of the Romand case, by refusing to be caught in the representational violence of much French cinema in the early 2000s, Cantet more clearly attends to the quotidian misery of many a French employee, even if, paradoxically, Vincent has no job at all throughout the film, except for his brief employment with Jean-Michel. Yet as Allen says, “he is faking, selling, persuading. The subtlety of this indictment is remarkable—the reason we don’t need to see the job Vincent used to do, is because it would too closely resemble the fake job he is (not) doing now.” (Reverse Shot)
What seems to interest Cantet is the slow suicide of a compromised life that can see no other options. Whether this is an attack on capitalism, on neo-liberalism or corporate management, or a comment on one man’s inability to find for himself a space within modern society, Cantet keeps categorical critique in abeyance, perhaps because he shows Nono has found a way out of the system. He may stay at home looking after their daughter, but he and his wife only have one child (Vincent has three), and their home is a modest dwelling next to Vincent’s large detached abode with its ample garden. We see fragments of Vincent’s house throughout the film, but it isn’t until near the end that we see its full size, in the wake of seeing his friend’s compact place. Cantet brings out the contrast well. When Vincent looks in from a distance at Nono’s flat, he is seeing a small, potentially cramped apartment, but what we see through the windows is a family chatting and laughing  as Nino continues into his studio. The flat certainly doesn’t look big, though it has space enough, space for three bedrooms, with the third, the studio. We might wonder what exactly Vincent is thinking when he looks in and on. The shots of him looking, standing on an embankment in semi-darkness, carry with them a revenant’s presence: a person as if returning from the dead looking on at the living. Vincent has removed himself from society by losing his job and by keeping mum about it, but he is still, inevitably, emotionally attached to it in the love he clearly shows towards his wife and children. When he looks in on the friend, he sees someone who has escaped the pressures of life without removing himself from the joys of domesticity.
Can Vincent return to reality himself, and what are the options in doing so? The film offers the expectation that he will take his life, perhaps those of his family, which would be close to the Romand case. But the film’s irony rests on Vincent doing no such thing and returning to the world again on its terms and not his own. The difference between Vincent and Nono is that a situation becomes vacant; Vincent will try to fill it, no matter the vacancy he feels in himself. If this is not at all a happy ending, it is because this is a capitulation rather than a voluntary return. Few won’t be relieved he hasn’t taken his life, and relieved too, and even more so, that he hasn’t killed his family. But the relief that may initially accompany the closing scene of the interview is quickly countered by the dread we see on Vincent’s face by the end of it. He is also still lying to people. When the interviewer asks him why he left his previous job after 11 years working for the company, Vincent says he felt he was going round in circles; he didn’t see any new opportunities. One can’t deny it would be difficult for Vincent to tell the truth in such circumstances: how can he say he spent several months wandering around France and Switzerland pretending he was still gainfully employed? It probably wouldn’t have been easy to say either that, after losing his last job, he needed time out, and he needed this time to recollect his thoughts, to discover what he wanted to do with his life. Instead, we see him once again telling stories, fabricating a perception of himself that will appeal to others, and watch as the film moves from a shot of the interviewer asking him questions, back to Vincent, and then back to the interviewer’s face, as the interviewer says : “your father says you’re not short of ambition.” The father’s comments may not have been dishonest, but they could be taken ironically; Vincent’s plans for major investment in Africa, however fraudulent, were ambitious. It also suggests that the reason Vincent has got the interview rests on his father’s reputation, and that the family has persuaded him to pursue this post. The film cuts back to Vincent as the camera slowly moves in on his face while Pook’s music comes in. The interviewer continues talking about the job, but the film suggests Vincent isn’t listening, as the music is as loud as the interviewer’s words. We may assume that Vincent is once again getting caught in a trap, a trap Cantet suggests is hardly Vincent’s alone, as Pook’s distressing score continues over the end credits. While music bleeding out from the diegesis over the closing titles is common enough, far less so is someone still speaking as the end credits come in. What he says seems irrelevant to what he feels, and what he feels the music instead conveys. Is there no escape, not just for Vincent but for numerous others too, who will be going to work on Monday morning aware that they are as incarcerated in their employment expectations as Vincent is in his?
        Jean-Claude Romand killed his family in January 1993; the numerous workplace deaths in France Telecom happened in a two-year period, twenty years later. We can note that “more than 30 employees of France Telecom committed suicide between 2008 and 2010 as reorganisation efforts to make the former monopoly more competitive contributed to workers’ psychological issues, a labor union said at the time.” (Irish Times) Cantet’s film manages to anticipate the future by drawing upon the past (the Romand case), ignoring the present (the French yen for depicting extreme violence), and anticipating the future (in the French Telecom and other workplace tragedies). One mustn’t exaggerate this foresight, nor see in the film what isn’t there: there is no sense that Vincent has been the subject of bullying, even if we might wonder precisely how and why he lost his job. However, when at the end of the film, the interviewer says “to be clear I am not pressurising you”, as Vincent replies “I’m not scared”, we might wonder if this is the state of corporate environments: that people are both pressured and frightened. The interviewer may not be pressuring him yet, but Vincent can expect plenty of it, perhaps, if he takes the job. The look on Vincent’s face indicates he is frightened, but of what we cannot easily discern. If the interviewer isn’t pressurising him, will his wife and father, in their no doubt loving way, be doing so by expecting him to take the job in the first place?
In retreating from the extremity of its potential subject matter, the film instead muses much more over what work is. What is it to be employed or unemployed, and how much do we choose the labour we offer? “…I didn’t want to make a film”, Cantet says, “about an exceptional, psychotic character.” But equally, he did want to make a film about the question of employment, a film that might wonder about “the prospect of a job as akin to slavery.” (Cineaste) When Cantet says people first reading the script saw a happy ending, he wanted to make clear in the images, in the sound, that this wasn’t so - that just because Vincent looks like he will get another job doesn’t mean he has resolved any of his problems. This is no doubt partly why we have the presence of both Nono and Jean-Michel, the one minding his own business making music; the other making a business out of goods that he smuggles into the country: he can buy them cheaply in Poland, and they sell for far more in France, but far cheaper than the price the goods would generally cost.
The casting of Jean-Michel was as thought through as the casting of Vincent, if for different reasons. If Cantet chose Aurelien Recoing for the subtlety and modulation this well-known theatre actor could convey, he went with Serge Livrozet as Jean-Michel for what he could bring to the role, predicated on his public persona. “Livrozet was a burglar when he was younger and went to prison and later, during the Seventies, became involved (together with Michel Foucault) in prisoners’ rights organizations when he got out.” Cantet sees him as a figure of the times, someone who “is a real product of the post ’68 era, although many people have forgotten him.” (Cineaste) Yet Cantet casts him as though we ought to remember, without losing sight of Livrozet as a character within the film. When Jean-Michel and Vincent sit together in a hotel room, Jean-Michel shows him images from an album, including press clippings of his time in prison.
With Nono and Jean-Michel, we have two options for living beyond the life Vincent is expected to live, but one involves a modest income and the other an illegal one. Instead, during the course of the film, Vincent chooses a hiatal existence, caught between the real world of work and the mythomanical one he creates. Bert Cardullo sees the irony: that the life he generates for himself probably requires more hard work and effort than the very job Vincent did have, that “producing this illusion of accomplishment is much more grueling and time-consuming than real or tangible work.” (Hudson Review) Cardullo earlier notes that “Time Out is a almost metaphysical contemplation of what many of us mean when we talk about work: not manual labor or factory work of the kind to be found in Cantet's first film, Human Resources (1999), but the corporate position in finance, consulting, management, and development that is hard to describe but which comfortably supports upper-middle-class European as well as American families.”  If Cardullo is right, then we are witnessing someone walking away from what in more contemporaneous and demotic terms has been called a bullshit job. It is David Graeber’s now-famous phrase to describe the various forms of labour that really don’t need to be done. “While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand.” (DavidGraeber.Org)
Perhaps Vincent loses his job less because he isn’t doing it properly, than that he recognises he doesn’t really have much of a job to do, and acknowledging that reality means inevitably he was going to lose his employment. He says that he became more engaged in the driving than the meetings, and at one moment says that sometimes he would drive hundreds of kilometres for an appointment, miss the turn off without thinking, and keep driving. Understandably, his boss was annoyed, but what seemed to annoy him the most was that Vincent “no longer had the company spirit”, as though the company spirit was antithetical to the wandering soul Vincent had become.  He is explaining this to Jean-Michel in the car, at night, as he gets involved in Jean-Michel’s goods-trafficking business. The film plays up the intimacy between these two men, confined in a car as they talk side by side, aware that the best conversations often take place when people are moving through space, looking in the same direction rather than sitting opposite each other. The lighting could be out of Rembrandt, with Vincent and Jean-Michel lit amongst the surrounding darkness. A real friendship is developing, even as the very exploitation of friendships has allowed Vincent to survive financially by exploiting the goodwill of the people he knows.
   However, it is as though, in keeping his unemployed status to himself, Vincent has created a void of truth that lies can occupy just as easily as non-disclosure. Instead of communicating with his friends and family, he starts to exploit them in a perfect metaphor, perhaps for the exploitation that Vincent may be offering when he involves them in putting their money into Africa — investing in the continent, a capitalist would insist; perhaps taking advantage of their resources at a cheap rate, others might say. Jean-Michel may well be doing the latter as well, as he buys cheap and sells high, seeing in Poland the possibilities in low-cost labour, just as Vincent can convince his friends that Africa is a burgeoning market ripe for rich returns. Such a position would be taking us away from the film’s preoccupations, and we should keep in mind that Cantet is not chiefly interested in the political dimension. “Ken Loach is a militant. I’m not. I ask a number of questions in my films, but I never answer one of them. I’m not interested in didacticism.” (Cineaste) There may be a place for Ken Loach’s political purposefulness, but it would be unfair to Cantet to insist we find it in one of his films. He instead seeks to understand not the importance of labour and the exploitation of the working classes, but to wonder what work happens to be and how it defines our lives. As he says, “Most people see the idea of work as a value initself. It’s hard to convince people that some people are meant for something other than work.”
It might be fairer to say the film is finally about consumerism rather than labour, and this is what Graeber points out in his article: “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.” What Keynes hadn’t factored in, though, was people’s need for things. “Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.” Graeber goes on to question this line as he notes: “Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.” What we have created are numerous useless jobs, and these would include for Graeber, the sort of work Vincent does, as he says “it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.” (DavidGraeber.Org) Whether Cantet would agree with the late, radical anthropologist, who became famous for his involvement in Occupy Wall Street, what the film seems to show is that we have gone beyond consumerism to the creation of appearances, from the sort of material consumption so brilliantly explored in the French context by Georges Perec’s Things and Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society, towards what Baudrillard would later call the simulacrum.  If Graeber is correct in assuming that we aren’t working such long hours because we are working so hard to produce the goods that we so wish to consume, but that instead we are working for the sake of appearing to have something to do, then this encapsulates an aspect of Vincent’s situation. Whether in or out of work, it doesn’t make much difference practically, only financially. He is no longer picking up a wage for doing little, doing the sort of work he no doubt did when employed, as he persuades his friends and family to invest. But now the front he must show is one based on deceit rather than self-deception. If before, like many a white-collar worker in the West, in Graeber’s take, Vincent has to fool himself into believing he is doing useful work, Vincent knows now he is lying. But he must convince others of the value of the project he is trying to sell them.
Thus, we can see the thin line between modes of deceit and, also, why we might find Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum useful. “It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of the real,” (‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’) he says, and this is echoed in Cardullo’s claim that “Cantet makes the subversive point that his protagonist is able to pull off this pretend virtuoso duplicity, because, as a manager, he was trained essentially to do nothing except manage other people — to manage his own techniques or ‘people skills,’ as it were.” (Hudson Review) Vincent moves smoothly from a bullshit job to becoming, in common parlance, a bullshitter — using the skills he used in employment all over again as an unemployed person needing cash. We can even note that the ‘jobs’ available to him through the course of the film (ripping his friends off with his scam, or ripping strangers off with Jean-Michel’s) are based on two distinct skills. The first is being a people person; someone others can trust, who can be convinced by the claims Vincent makes that he can accumulate value on people’s investments. The second is based on the ability to stay awake and drive a car. His previous job required these skills to come together; now they are separate and both based on illegality. Yet at the same time, though the trafficking of counterfeit goods is dishonest, there is honest labour in the deed, in driving from one country to another. When he is selling investments to his friends there is no honesty at all — just a simulacrum, a version of Vincent the man of finance who knows he can use the same patter all over again but without the corporate logo.
If Cantet has made a work that isn’t about the actual case, one that doesn’t lead to Vincent murdering his family, then what sort of violence does the film practice, if we can call it violence at all? There is an irony that shows, while Vincent’s scams will be devastating to the people losing their savings, he will be leaving impoverished countries alone. “From 1999 to 2002, the Kabila regime (in The Democratic Republic of Congo) ‘transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state-mining sector to private companies under its control... with no compensation or benefit for the State treasury,’ a United Nations investigation found.” (CNN) Sara Lowes reckons, “a striking aspect of colonial history in Africa is that all major colonial powers granted concessions to private companies. The primary objective of these companies was to extract natural resources in the colonies.” She says that within Africa, concessions were established in French, British, Belgian, German, and Portuguese colonies (such as  Angola, Botswana, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Gabon, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). ‘‘The concession companies were assigned powers that are typically associated with governments, such as monopoly over violence and taxation ability.” (Vox Dev) If Vincent were acting honestly in his friends’ interests, these would be the sort of investments he would be making. But instead, Africa is safe from such dubious help because Vincent has turned his job virtual: rather than merely saying that Vincent has become a liar and a fraud, better to see he is part of a broader problem than his own mythomania. Cantet might be no militant; his film does show that Vincent’s life isn’t just that of an individual a little lost, but that he is a figure of the corporate world even when he is no longer in it. As he sits in his car or in a cottage in the hills, Vincent reads about African investments: “between 1990 and 1998, there was a great deal of privatisation in South Africa, $1.4b, Ghana $769m, Nigeria, $500m…” What he will be doing with these numbers fraudulently, as he gets his friends and family to invest in not just Africa but the opening markets of Eastern Europe as well, others may well be doing so exploitatively. When Vincent says to his father that “simply put, we help create companies in developing countries…we offer financing to start up the companies, but we also follow up as executive consultants”, is this really a good Samaritan work?
Our purpose isn’t to comment on the justification or otherwise of investment in Africa and emerging markets, but we might wonder how philanthropic such investments are when what matters is the high returns generated. With the possible exception of Nono, nobody seems interested in whether this will be good for the developing country; they are preoccupied with the margin of their profit. Vincent’s purpose is to convince them of the validity of the project, and we don’t doubt that these are transferable skills: from corporate employment to ripping off friends. What the film illustrates is that, while employed, we might assume Vincent would be legally exploiting the developing world; unemployed, he is exploiting the developed world — his friends who have enough spare cash to seek a financial killing.  While there are no murders in the film, there is plenty to suggest a twofold despair. On the one hand, we have Vincent and other white-collar workers doing well for themselves, yet with little self to call their own. The first friend Vincent talks to about investing their savings, Fred (Christopher Charles) says, “doing less gets boring”, as he adds, “sometimes after work I just can’t go home…go out, feel like I did something with my day.” It is the sort of quiet lassitude, even despair, Michel Houellebecq was writing so well and scurrilously about around the same time: the sort of person who ends up medicated and prey to feelings of inadequacy, while possessing useless desires. On the other hand, there are those who remain invisible and exploited, targets of investment opportunities which are often unsuccessful enough, as investments rather than returns, for the people of these countries to become very visible indeed when they come to Europe looking for work and opportunities — just as inversely the white collar worker would at a safe distance be involved in work and opportunities in Africa. It makes sense that there are only a few black faces in Time Out, despite all the talk of the continent. We may see a black man amongst a group of whites in one boardroom meeting at the corporate building Vincent hangs out in, and a person of colour briefly seen dining at the hotel where Vincent talks to Fred, but this is a white man’s world. Africa is an absent presence, and whatever miseries inflicted or endured aren’t Vincent’s business, and thus can’t be the film’s.
It might be too much to project the violence the film eschews onto a continent it never shows us, but perhaps we can at least propose that the film countenances a permeating hostility which would be ruined by activating concrete aggression. If Vincent had turned murderous, would we have the exception proving the rule, rather than a symptomological account of white- collar ennui? This is an ennui that nevertheless may be having devastating consequences in other parts of the world as money made in the West out of the East, Africa and elsewhere, has one part of the globe juggling numbers, while other parts are juggling with their lives. It is true that numerous France Telecom workers went to extreme lengths to register their despair, but if one of them had ended their life, or one of them had gone on a murderous rampage, this wouldn’t have been perceived as an indictment of managerial practices, but perhaps only an isolated incident, saying more about the individual work than the structural approach of the firm. Vincent’s purpose is to be ordinary rather than extraordinary, and this is fundamentally different from Jean-Claude Romand, as Carrere explores him. The French writer was very understandably fascinated by someone who, for eighteen years, had hidden his life from friends and family, claimed to be working in a profession when he hadn’t even passed the exams decades earlier, and went on to kill his wife, his children and his parents, rather than face the shame of them recognising the sham. It is a story so rare that it asks many questions about the psychology of such a man.
Cantet instead makes his central character unemployed for three months and shows him finding ways to cheat friends and family with promises of high returns. Yet if the film feels permeated by violence, nevertheless, it rests on more, we might think, than expectation. When Quentin Tarantino made Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he would have known that many in the audience were aware that Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson’s gang, but he instead shows Manson and his maniacs getting slaughtered. Jacob Stalworthy called it “a revisionist fairy tale” (Independent), and much of the film’s appeal rests on knowing history and the history of Tarantino’s knowingness. Many watching Time Out would have known too that it was based on an event with a gruesome outcome. But instead of inverting it (the family killing Vincent?), Cantet symptomises it by removing the actualised violence, and wonders instead how it permeates the world he shows as a low -key tension, where people are alienated from each other, and perhaps for no better reason than it is a milieu where people are expected to exploit humans close to home or elsewhere. It is the way the world works, even if it isn’t so useful for how people work, how they tick.
There is the suggestion here that whether Vincent is stripping his friends of their resources or African nations of theirs, he is just doing business. Yet this isn’t business as production, but as extraction and abstraction. Vincent persuades people to part with their cash on a false premise, but the real premise would probably only be a different form of extortion. The African nations have little money; Western nations have need of their gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, uranium, platinum, oil and natural gas. This isn’t the place to enquire into the nature of that exploitation, of how Western (and Russian and Chinese) companies make large fortunes out of the continent’s resources. It is, however, to comprehend that, from a certain point of view, Vincent has in his fraudulent scheme with family and friends, reversed the nature of that potential exploitation, and allowed it to be an internal French problem rather than an external African one. If Jason Hickel is right that “rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones”, then better that Vincent is merely screwing over a few friends and members of his family. Hickel says, “that In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them.” (Guardian) When Vincent convinces those around him of investment opportunities, he may be lining his own pocket, but at least he isn’t pickpocketing from the developing world.
Cantet has eschewed the violent and alluded to the exploitative, and has thus neither made a film about a familial spree killer, nor about the world’s resources stripped by greedy capitalists. To have moved in either direction could have allowed him to address one of these problems clearly and yet offered a less developed approach to it. In other words, we would have comprehended the depths of the central character’s desperation, or the exploitation involved in the finance industry, an area of work that can seem to be quietly minding its own business, while noisily disrupting economies elsewhere. However, Cantet offers the subtlest of stories, a tale about a man who wonders what happens when you drop out of your life, while giving the impression to everyone that you are still living a remarkably similar existence. It manages to make us wonder about the permeating alienation of a socio-economic system based on appearances. With Vincent looking like he is going to return to work, much of his labour will be involved in sustaining an image of employment that he has been practising while unemployed. Yet in gainfully returning to the workforce, we might assume that, rather than taking advantage of his nearest and dearest, he will once more be exploiting the poorest of strangers.

© Tony McKibbin