Photo: Aurélien Recoing as Vincent in Laurent Cantet's Time Out
Laurent Cantet's Time Out is an intense look at one man's professional angst and its rollover effects, a terrifying study of bourgeois desperation worthy of Claude Chabrol. Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) loses his job and, rather than tell his relatives, invents a new one. He studies a company's media kits and manages to convince friends and family to invest in his fantasy corporation. Vincent's journey is an affront to the dehumanization of economic slavery. By lying to himself and the world around him and freeing himself from responsibility, he achieves the kind of freedom where the only person he has to answer to is himself. Though clearly in turmoil, Vincent seems to take a kind of silent pleasure in his deceit. Like Dirk Bogarde's delusional protagonist in Fassbinder's Despair, the oppressed Vincent may be deranged if only because it appears as if he's really convinced of the authenticity of his fabricated existenz.
Laurent Cantet's Time Out is an intense look at one man's professional angst and its rollover effects, a terrifying study of bourgeois desperation worthy of Claude Chabrol. Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) loses his job and, rather than tell his relatives, invents a new one. He studies a company's media kits and manages to convince friends and family to invest in his fantasy corporation. Vincent's journey is an affront to the dehumanization of economic slavery. By lying to himself and the world around him and freeing himself from responsibility, he achieves the kind of freedom where the only person he has to answer to is himself. Though clearly in turmoil, Vincent seems to take a kind of silent pleasure in his deceit. Like Dirk Bogarde's delusional protagonist in Fassbinder's Despair, the oppressed Vincent may be deranged if only because it appears as if he's really convinced of the authenticity of his fabricated existenz.
