Climbing Up an Imaginary Corporate Ladder

One of the better ways to waste time is to imagine how aliens would recreate our lives given only the remnants of our popular culture. Of all the things that would be missing from our lives, I think work would be the most conspicuously absent--aside from cops and doctors, there would scarcely be any evidence that most people's days are spent in labor, hard or otherwise.

French director Laurent Cantet is an anomaly: his two features films to date both center around work, and more specifically, the labor problems of the French economy. The second of them, Time Out, opening this week, tells the story of a consultant who elaborately pretends to have a job rather than admit to his family that he has been out of work for almost three years. While the scenario may sound like one of Jim Carrey's better set-ups, the approach is dead serious: From the first image of the unemployed Vincent (AurÈlien Recoing) slumped in his car seat, whispering to his cell phone, the film turns the exterior world into a atmosphere of almost total hostility.

Despite the fact that he is in every scene, Recoing doesn't so much act but provide a blank expression, sometimes on the verge of panic. In fact, the film relies heavily on the Kuleshov effect, the name given to the Soviet discovery that a spectator's impression of an actor's performance depends on the material he is edited against. Much of the film is simply Recoing's head spliced together with the highway-business landscape; it's a testament to Cantet and his collaborator's skills (including the excellent score by Jocelyn Pook) that something so basic is so powerful.

At first it's hard to tell whether Recoing's Vincent is unemployed or not: In the film cuts between successive phone conversations, he describes how meetings went, though all we see is him driving around the countryside, sitting in his car, going into rest stops. After sleeping in his car, Vincent returns home to his oblivious (and still upper-middle class) family, where word has spread that he may be accepting a new job.

From there, the film tracks Vincent's descent into greater desperation, as he moves from pretending he has a new job with the UN in Geneva to soliciting hundreds of thousands of francs from his friends in a fraudulent investment scheme, and finally to dealing counterfeit merchandise with a convicted felon, played with appropriate sliminess by the bronzed, wrinkled Serge Livrozet.

What dominates memory of this film are highways at night, flourescent-lit interiors seen from the outside, infinite reflections in the glass of post-post-modernist architecture.

When I saw Time Out for the first time at last fall's New York Film Festival, it appeared to be something close to a masterpiece. Seeing it again in its country of origin both lessened and increased its sheen: it seemed almost too well constructed, too free from error. Economics today is such a messy matter that BMW-engineered filmmaking may actually be the wrong approach.