Barnes & Noble

The private agony of an unemployed family man unfolds with subdued intensity in Time Out, a French drama from director Laurent Cantet. The story moves at a measured pace, following a middle-class husband and father (Aurélien Recoing) who hasn't told his family that he's been fired from his job. He leads a strange double life, spending nights sleeping in his car while telling his wife he's away on business. It's a private odyssey of deception and pent-up suffering that is hypnotically powerful, full of petty humiliations that he seems to accept without emotion. Recoing's lead performance is striking in its understated power, as he dons a mask of inscrutability while balancing on a line between confidence and desperation, never descending to pathos. Indeed, Time Out avoids its potential for sentimentality and skids by any overt politicization or moralizing. Instead, the film patiently evokes a sense of a man's eerie dislocation and solitude, alienated from a corporate world where he once belonged, at home now only on long stretches of deserted highway. With the ominous undertones of Jocelyn Pook's slow, hauntingly beautiful score, the result is a brilliant study of an enigmatic emotional isolation that is simply and quietly riveting. Gregory Baird

All Movie Guide

French director Laurent Cantet's sophomore effort is a somber and complex meditation on work -- specifically, how work has become the defining feature of the contemporary individual as well as the quintessential symbol of quotidian despair. The movie tells the story of Vincent (Aurelien Recoing), a middle-class family man recently fired from his drab, middle-management job. Unable to tell his family about his firing, Vincent spends his workdays driving around the French countryside --"business trips" he tells his wife -- keeping intact the reassuring routine of going to work and coming home to his wife and kids. As his family grows suspicious of his evasive behavior, Vincent is forced to spin a new tale, pretending to get a job working for the U.N. In a bid to keep the money coming in, he recruits old friends to invest in an imaginary emerging-markets investment scheme. Vincent also falls in with Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet), a black market dealer whose ignominious past serves as an ominous warning for Vincent's present course. Despite his efforts to maintain an undisturbed surface, Vincent's wife begins to suspect something amiss. As the lies pile up and the questions from his family mount, Vincent loses control of his fragile double life, leading to a poignant conclusion. Cantet's film premiered at the 2001 Venice Film Festival. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide

Product Details

• UPC: 786936208399
• Source: MIRAMAX
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Theatre Wide-Screen (1.85.1)
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: Dolby Digital Stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
• Language: Français
• Subtitles: English
• Time: 2:08:00
• Sales Rank: 45,098

Features:

DVD MENU