Laurent Cantet’s Time Out is an effectively creepy film about work, business, and emptiness. The protagonist is a management/consultant/financial type, who can’t bear to tell his wife and family (or even emotionally admit to himself) that he has lost his job; so he drives around all day, fantasizing details of his busy work schedule in calls home to his wife on his mobile phone, then finally shows up late in the evening, exhausted, to play his role as husband and father & fall into bed. As this film goes on, all this escalates, as he fabulates about new jobs for which he even seems to be writing business reports and proposals, pitches fake investments to his friends, and digs himself further and further into a hole of debts and fabrications. The film is almost terrifying in its evocation of an uncanny emotional blankness that could just as well be the actuality of work in the business world, as it is the protagonist’s self-deceiving simulation of such work. Cantet convincingly imagines the affect of privileged bourgeois life in late capitalism, and it isn’t a pretty sight.
Time Out
Laurent Cantet’s Time Out is an effectively creepy film about work, business, and emptiness. The protagonist is a management/consultant/financial type, who can’t bear to tell his wife and family (or even emotionally admit to himself) that he has lost his job; so he drives around all day, fantasizing details of his busy work schedule in calls home to his wife on his mobile phone, then finally shows up late in the evening, exhausted, to play his role as husband and father & fall into bed. As this film goes on, all this escalates, as he fabulates about new jobs for which he even seems to be writing business reports and proposals, pitches fake investments to his friends, and digs himself further and further into a hole of debts and fabrications. The film is almost terrifying in its evocation of an uncanny emotional blankness that could just as well be the actuality of work in the business world, as it is the protagonist’s self-deceiving simulation of such work. Cantet convincingly imagines the affect of privileged bourgeois life in late capitalism, and it isn’t a pretty sight.