a few words on time out, which i just saw. it covers some of the same ground as caché, in that it addresses the pervasive discomfort of the first world’s ruling class. just like in caché, the protagonist is a middle aged man haunted by secrets, which he works strenuously at keeping from his family and in particular from his wife. also like in caché, the wife is “innocent,†not part of the husband’s secret life, outside the circle of his tormenting ghosts. unlike the binoche character, she doesn’t express this outsider status with relentless and frustrated questioning, but, rather, with long silences and wrenching looks. the silences between these people who clearly have so much they should be talking about saturate the movie and are perhaps its most disturbing feature. at the end, when vincent runs from home, the wife’s voice on the cellphone feels for a moment like a relief: finally they’ll talk! but no. vincent is out of auditory range and, in any case, muriel is once again making soothing noises without addressing any of the issues that are torturing vincent and their marriage.
the scene in the house when vincent’s scheme is unveiled and the whole family gangs up against him is most unnerving. no one will tell him anything. we are not told what it is they know. finally, in a further avoidance of conversation, muriel calls vincent’s father to deal with the situation. even then, the exchange with the father is not shown.
all along, you have a sense of a man who’s been deracinated. cantet portrays this rootlessness not as simply personal (psychological) but as cultural. references to the third world, eastern europe, immigration and other infiltrations of otherness into the national imaginary are everywhere. at a crucial point, vincent’s youngest son complains innocently that a boy called youssef hit him at school. vincent asks who won and the kid says triumphantly, “i did.â€
it seems to me that both cantet and haneke use silence and secrecy as signs of a new kind of cultural speechlessness. first-world language is not able to deal with multicultural pressures. while the men (georges, vincent) fumble, lie, and talk too much, the women retreat into hurt and a sense of entitlement (to their husbands’ trust, to a right to share their burdens, to their cooperation in dealing with the kids, etc.). i love the way both films show white privilege come unravelled. it’s done subtly, through well-tended interiors, orderly houses, husband-and-wife affection, fetching young children and surly teenagers. the drama is consumed inside the bourgeois home (and inside suburban vehicles).
both of cantet’s last two films deal with the shattering of middle class complacency, with the dark seedy ground in which privilege sinks its roots. good stuff.
This is fascinating, Gio. I watched ‘Time Out’ a couple of years ago and read it as a critique of capitalism, as a movie fundamentally “about” the alienating experience of capitalist work, particularly white collar, professional jobs. In part, I read the movie this way because I had just watched Cantet’s ‘Human Resources’ which is much more clearly about work. In that case the movie portrays fairly straightforward class conflict in a factory, and overlays it with a clash of expectations between a working class father who wants class mobility for his son, and his white collar son’s sudden recognition that the factory is screwing its employees. It seemed to me that Cantet was one of the few directors around who still took capitalist work as a central theme for his movies. But your reading of ‘Time Out’ is much richer, and goes well beyond the subject of work. This spurs me to watch it again.
yes, my response to gio’s review is the same as chris’s. i too saw it as primarily about the psychic costs of alienated work, and the continuities between legal and illegal jobs. i liked it when i first saw (almost five years ago) but i think i like the film gio saw more. maybe i’ll watch it again too.
I too should probably see this again as Gio points out some very interesting details that I do not remember. I’ve seen both films and have to say that Haneke’s film, for me, is far more unsettling in its explicit critique of modern, middle-class complacency. That doesn’t mean it is necessarily any better than Time Out, but the comparison between the two doesn’t entirely jibe (Time Out did strike me as an existential study in purposelessness as refracted through upper-middle-class issues of identity, masculinity and the all-consuming sway of capitalist ideology). I do like Cantet’s films a lot (though I had a tougher time sitting through Heading South, which Chris wrote about with great passion some time ago). Gio, have you seen Dominik Moll’s Lemming with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charlotte Rampling? I was reminded of that film when reading your initial post.
i was looking at lemming on imdb just yesterday, for totally unrelated reasons! i love it when this happens.
while i was washing the dishes this morning i remembered a brief off-hand conversation among the whole gathered family in time out about fair trade coffee. it’s quick and almost unnoticeable, so much so that i had forgotten it until the dregs of my (not fair-trade) coffee in the drain of my sink jolted my memory.
human resources is also (among other things, for sure) about alienated middle-class, isn’t it? having the opportunity to enter the middle class, frank turns it down. while looking at class conflict within a specific community, human resources keeps an eye on global capitalism, too, since it is global capitalism that is ultimately or at least in large measure responsible for downsizing, the weakening of labor unions, and the undermining of a strong working class.