Hey folks, Harry here... Read this review in your angry 'whatever' accent and do it outdoors under a blanket of stars with a beautiful woman at your side while dressed in macked out fashions and togas... And you'll still be a pimple on the ass of coolness... which is Copernicus... Lord high chief of the stars, the moon and the explosions they often make! Here's his report on the French film TIME OUT which he apparently hated like a shard of glass in his heel.
Going into TIME OUT (L‚Emploi du Temps), Laurent Cantet's second feature, fortified by good reviews by David Ansen of Newsweek and Roger Ebert, I was hoping for the rarest of gems, a nearly oxymoronic impossibility -- a good French movie. With the fresh visions offered by Amelie and The Brotherhood of the Wolf, I was hoping that French cinema had broken out of its "two people arguing in the kitchen" mentality.
C'est impossible, at least judging from TIME OUT. Not only is it a let down, it is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. There goes two hours of TIME OUT of my life that I'll never get back. TIME OUT is two very long hours of a guy doing nothing and lying to his family about it. I am serious -- this movie needs no more than a one-sentence summary. The main character, Vincent, (Aurelien Recoing) gets fired, but instead of telling his family, he just wanders around, and makes up stories about where he has been. He tells his friends that he works for the UN and has a great investment scheme planned if they want to buy in. So he essentially steals from his friends to fund his work ethic of laziness. Great, seems like some conflict is going to come out of this! Alas, when things start to come to a head, he just gives his friends their money back! But wait, the wife starts to catch on to the husband's suspicious activities. Maybe they'll at least have the proverbial argument in the kitchen. (I never imagined I would be wishing for that, but throw me a bone here. I'll take anything!) But no, she just kind of ambles through the movie, always moping, never confronting him (at least not until the very end). Thus, at every turn conflict is avoided. If you wrote this kind of script in film school, they would kick you right out, no questions asked.
I may have been painting with a broad brush earlier when I castigated all of French cinema. But this wreck of celluloid takes everything that I hate about that overly pretentious genre of actionless, plotless, "let's raise some points with no answers and pretend we are intellectuals" movies and raises it to a power of 10. It is not that all French films like this, but the French are the best in the world at the art of bad storytelling. Godard once said that the cinema is "truth at 24 frames per second." Well, TIME OUT didn't need all 24. The frame could have changed once a minute and people wouldn‚t have noticed. Because 'nothing fucking happens'! I just want to shake the director and scream at him, "Film is a dynamic medium! DYNAMIC! Please, please for the love of god move this plot forward."
I take great issue with the idea that a drama doesn't have to have drama. Actually, I don't know what category to put this movie in. Normally, a movie that defies convention and is hard to classify is a good thing. But in this case, the movie isn't part drama, part comedy, part thriller -- it is part nothing, part nothing, and part nothing. Not an existentialist nothing, not a Seinfeldian nothing, just a big fat nothing nothing. There is no comedy, no drama, and there certainly aren't any thrills. Heroin wouldn't make this movie interesting.
You may be asking yourself why I am not using the writers code words for a plot that goes nowhere, calling it a "character driven piece." Ha! I wish! These characters couldn't drive across the street with a chauffeur and a police escort. Most of the characters, like the wife, the kids, and the father of the main character are mere props. You might as well count the furniture in the cast. The single exception is Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet), who is a somewhat mysterious character with a shady past that sees right through Vincent. Livrozet has wonderful charisma, an impish smile, and plays the character perfectly, but like the rest of the cast he has little to do.
Rather than see TIME OUT, spend some time in. Bathe your cat, clean out your refrigerator. Hell, you might as well scrub your toilet. Anything would be more fun and thought provoking than this movie. If you do want to see a movie that makes the same point, that middle management workers are trained in little but making themselves look busy doing nothing, rent OFFICE SPACE on DVD instead.
Copernicus
