Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
The French filmmaker Laurent Cantet died this week, age 63; his terrific debut feature was Human Resources, in 1999, and his 2008 film The Class won the top prize at Cannes that year. Here's my 2002 review, originally published in The Herald, of his haunting movie Time Out.
The actor who appears in every scene of Time Out, a new French film, has the perfect look for his vague character. He looks a little like the comedian Larry Miller: pasty-faced, balding, with a flicker of fear in his small eyes.
It also helps that this actor, Aurelien Recoing, is new to movies, having spent most of his career as a stage actor. This unassuming man is our guide through a most peculiar story.
Recoing plays Vincent, a man we first meet driving aimlessly through the countryside, sleeping in his car, doing nothing. He tells his wife (Karin Viard) he’s coming to and from meetings. Very slowly we piece together his life: he was fired from his job a month earlier, but can’t bring himself to disappoint his family by telling them about it. So he invents a new job, an important position with the United Nations in Geneva, which will require him to be gone from home during the week.
He doesn’t actually work anywhere, of course. He just drives around and sleeps in his car at night. But he begins calling friends and soliciting money, telling them his UN connections give him an inside track on a profitable investment set-up. So the film has a built-in suspense device: will he get caught, and when? Yet writer-director Laurent Cantet is more interested in plumbing Vincent’s mysterious drop-out from the world.
Cantet, who made the excellent labor movie Human Resources a couple of years ago, makes his points in offhand ways. We notice that Vincent’s oldest son is becoming exactly as vague as his father when he disappears to find adolescent adventures.
The ironies are subtle. Perhaps Vincent gave himself an important-sounding job to fascinate people after years as a drone; yet his father still doubts Vincent’s ability to really help the world. Poor Vincent invents a job of global importance, but he still can’t impress the old man.
The slow accumulation of details, aided by the haunting music of Jocelyn Pook (she did the unnerving music in Eyes Wide Shut), makes for a riveting experience. We are left not knowing exactly how Vincent’s subterfuge works as long as it does, but perhaps that increases the allure.
In the deliberately nebulous performance by Aurelien Recoing, we see a devastating version of the modern man at work: networking, crunching numbers, filling his cell phone with talk…but what for?
April 26, 2024
