''Time Out'' (french: link=no, L'Emploi du temps or 'Le Vendu') is a 2001 French

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super ...

directed by

Laurent Cantet Laurent Cantet (; born 11 April 1961) is a French director, cinematographer and screenwriter. His film ''Entre les murs'' ('' The Class'') won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. Biography Laurent Cantet was born in 1961 in the town ...

and starring

Aurélien Recoing Aurélien Recoing (born 5 May 1958) is a French actor and stage director. Personal life Aurélien Recoing is the son of (puppeteer), and the brother of (director and translator), Blaise Recoing (actor and musician), and David Recoing (pianist, ...

and Karin Viard. The film is loosely based on the life story of Jean-Claude Romand (though without the criminal element), and it focuses on one of Cantet's favorite subjects: a man's relationship with his job. The film received considerable attention internationally and was shown at the

Venice Film Festival The Venice Film Festival or Venice International Film Festival ( it, Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia, "International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art of the Venice Biennale") is an annual film festival h ...

and

Toronto International Film Festival The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, often stylized as tiff) is one of the largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, attracting over 480,000 people annually. Since its founding in 1976, TIFF has grown to become a perman ...

. It was one of the independent films to be featured at the

New York Film Festival The New York Film Festival (NYFF) is a film festival held every fall in New York City, presented by Film at Lincoln Center (FLC). Founded in 1963 by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel with the support of Lincoln Center president William Schuman, i ...

Plot

The film tells the story of Vincent, a middle-aged man who is fired after having spent more than 11 years working for a prestigious consulting firm. Unable to admit to his family that he has been fired, the unemployed former executive continues to pretend he is going to the office every day. In reality, Vincent spends his time aimlessly driving the highways of France and Switzerland, reading newspapers, or sleeping in his car. As time progresses, Vincent invents more and more elaborate lies, throwing himself into a vicious spiral of deceit. To sustain his bourgeois lifestyle, Vincent sets up a Ponzi scheme and is eventually enlisted into smuggling by career thief Jean-Michel. Murielle, Vincent's wife, after discovering her husband's "life of lies" attempts to bring him back into the realm of reality.

Cast

as Vincent * Karin Viard as Muriel *

Serge Livrozet Serge Livrozet (21 October 1939 – 29 November 2022) was a French writer and ex-convict. Livrozet was born in 1939 in Toulon, France. He was well known for his work advocating against solitary confinement and the death penalty. He also acted, p ...

as Jean-Michel * Jean-Pierre Mangeot as Father * Monique Mangeot as Mother * Didier Perez as Philippe * Philippe Jouannet as Human Resources Director

Reception

''Time Out'' received generally positive reviews from critics. Review aggregation website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

reported an approval rating of 96%, based on 82 reviews, with an average rating of 8/10. The consensus reads, "A haunting psychological drama, ''Time Out'' takes a penetrating look at the angst of the modern worker." At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 88, based on 30 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". The film was placed at 99 on '' Slant Magazines ''best films of the 2000s, number 9 of ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'''s best films of the noughties, and number 11 at ''

The A.V. Club ''The A.V. Club'' is an American online newspaper and entertainment website featuring reviews, interviews, and other articles that examine films, music, television, books, games, and other elements of pop-culture media. ''The A.V. Club'' was cre ...

''s top 50 films of the 2000s.

Accolades

References

External links

* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Time Out 2001 drama films 2001 films Films directed by Laurent Cantet Films scored by Jocelyn Pook French drama films 2000s French-language films 2000s French films