Product Description

Vincent is a businessman on the move. Seemingly at the top of his game, Vincent speeds between meetings and conferences ... using his cell phone to share the smallest detail of his professional life with his admiring wife, Muriel. What she doesn't know is that Vincent is leading a double life. He was fired from his job and has constructed an elaborate fantasy of employment that has become his full-time occupation. His fictional new job provides "investment opportunities" for his old friends and even his parents. But the web of lies threatens to choke him when the investors start asking about their money. Vincent must now decide which of his lives is most important.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20293 in DVD
• Brand: Disney
• Released on: 2003-01-14
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 134 minutes

Amazon.com
The mysterious Time Out is a riveting film, despite (because of?) the fact that hardly anything happening in it corresponds to our notion of movie "action." Vincent (Aurélien Recoing, a top French theater actor but cinematic newcomer) is an out-of-work family man living along the Swiss border. He's never told anyone he's lost his job with a U.N. bureau. He leaves home in the morning--when not working out of his (nonexistent) Geneva apartment--and does things like go to an all-glass office tower and hover as if he belonged. Vincent's excellent at seeming to belong; Recoing's performance is an uncanny symphony of collegial tics, benign watchfulness, and shy, tolerant shrugs. Eventually we gather that Vincent is running a swindle, the ease of which seems to quietly horrify him. However, the most unsettling thing about his fictional work posture is that we come to realize it's scarcely less genuine than, or different from, the shell game that is the real thing. --Richard T. Jameson

From The New Yorker
A quietly brilliant movie. Vincent (Aurélien Recoing), a fortyish French business consultant, gets canned from his job but refuses to tell his family. Instead he spends his time driving around the hushed, beautiful countryside near the Swiss border and showering his friends with business-school jargon ("restructuring" is a particular favorite). They take him for a U.N. official running private investments on the side, and he easily fleeces them. But there's no particular point to Vincent's swindles: he's a fantasist, a put-on artist who wants the freedom not to work, and he's unwilling to disappoint anybody. Laurent Cantet's movie starts as an anecdote about unemployment and turns into a meditation on modern work. What, after all, does it mean to labor in a global economy in which the First World players like Vincent seem to be constantly moving abstractions around on an endless flowchart of possibilities? The hidden joke in this gravely lyrical movie is that no one can tell the difference between Vincent's invented nonsense and the real nonsense. With Karin Viard as Vincent's wife and Serge Livrozet as a creepy smuggler who at least deals in tangible goods. In French. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

highly recommended mood movie
When Vincent--a tall, quiet, morose middle-aged man--is fired from his job, he finds himself unexpectedly cut loose from society and set adrift from life as he knows it. Instead of looking for a job, he casually cons some family and friends out of substantial chunks of money in order to support his wife and three children while he spends week after week driving through the European countryside in winter. A subdued but inescapable tension builds for the audience as we continually fail to understand what motivates Vincent to risk so much, and this tension becomes only more profound when we realize that Vincent himself does not understand his actions. "Time Out" is a hypnotically sad story told at a measured, melancholy pace with a haunting musical score that circumscribes Vincent's strange, incomprehensible mystery.

Man's Search for Happiness...
Vincent is on a route where he is out driving trying to find something, while hiding that he has been laid off from his family. The anxiety of displaying failure to his family and parents seems to be overwhelming for Vincent and he begins to pretend that he has quit his job for a better job in Switzerland. Through his idea of lying about his newly acquired job, he is lead astray from reality, and he must cover his lies by providing the necessary means for his family. He does so by scamming his acquaintances and friends for large amounts of money. In return, he offers a large profit through his pretend job, however, this is overheard by a man in a hotel lobby. This man interferes with Vincent's plan, but in return he finds a new profitable business through this stranger. During this, Vincent is struggling with to keep his family happy and content, but the wife begins to smell a rat. Time Out is an intriguing slow paced thriller about a man's pride and his search for happiness, which provides well developed characters and ingenious cinematography that enhances the quality of the film. Ultimately, the audience is provided well-rounded story that is presented through an astounding cinematic experience.

The Search for Meaning in Ordinary Life
Vincent is an average working stiff family man who suddenly lose his job. Finding another job is not really the problem, something deeper than unemployment is troubling this man. His old job so consumes him, yet at the same time is so meaningless to him, that he panicks and become slightly unhinged. He doesn't tell his family, and pretend to be still working, spending his days driving around the country side, sitting in parks. Gradually, he descend into moral seediness.

What's disturbing is that this guy has a very loving family and good, decent friends. It's the man's relationship with his work that's troubling. The movie didn't really come together for me until the very last shot, where the themes of the movie that bubbled under the surface rise up in the subtle emotions of his face as a quiet trap close over him.

Some people may say, "Well, he is bored with his job, so what? Many of us are!" But I think that's merely the surface of what he is going through. He is a lost man desperately searching for meaning and passion in life. In that aspect, his struggles are like many of our daily struggles amplified, and deserve our sympathy.