“Time Out” has the mounting dread of a thriller, but the suspense is internal. It has the stately, well-crafted anxiety of a Hitchcock movie, except that the protagonist and antagonist are one and the same. A movie like this could never get made in Hollywood: Cantet thrives on ambiguity and nuance; he prefers questions to solutions. (Compare this with the Ben Affleck and Samuel Jackson psychological thriller “Changing Lanes,” a tense, well-made corporate morality tale that seems facile next to the French film: all the moral issues have been predigested for the audience.)
In Vincent’s fabricated life, he’s a U.N. consultant on Third World aid with an office in far-off Geneva. He gets his friends to “invest” in his made-up business schemes. But to repay them he needs to make money, which leads him to Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet), a con man who sees through Vincent’s charade, and offers him work smuggling fake watches across the French-Swiss border. Where will all these deceptions lead? Cantet’s resolution is unexpected and brilliantly double-edged.
Cantet is one of the few filmmakers whose subject is the workplace. His compelling first film, “Human Resources,” was set in a factory, and had an almost documentary feel. “Time Out” is more stylish and hushed, at once suspenseful and melancholy. It can’t be neatly fitted into a genre, just as its hero–played with devastating understatement by Recoing–can’t be easily dismissed as a psycho or a villain. This is what makes Cantet’s film so unusual and so unnerving: it refuses to pathologize Vincent. Smart, sensitive and resourceful, he could be anyone displaced in a world of meaningless work, desperately trying to create a life that makes sense. Except that Vincent is creating it out of thin air.
