Why Do We Have to Work?

Radicalism comes in many forms. It doesn’t have to have wild hair, weird clothes or a confrontational manner. It can be balding, dressed in a conservative suit, inoffensive. It can be, in short, Vincent (Aurelien Recoing), the soft-spoken, middle-aged financial consultant in Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out.”

Vincent, who has a wife, three kids and a nice house, is unemployed and might seem at first glance to be merely unwilling to confront this fact. He talks on his cell phone, scours want ads and infrequently returns home, claiming he’s been working a lot. He sleeps in his car and dines at truck stops.

This isn’t just a world-class case of denial or shame at being fired. As Cantet, who is French, puts it in his secondhand English during a recent visit here, “I think it is more radical than that. It says that work is not the only way to exist and that you can find people for whom work is just slavery, and those people try to escape it. People should be able to define themselves like a man and not like a man with working. I think this sort of religion of work is something in every nation.

“I have a lot of friends in France who earned a lot of money,” he continues. “They were having a very easy life, and at 40 they realized, ‘What does that bring me? Just money. I don’t have time. I don’t have any way of improving myself in my job.’ Some of them are now quitting just to try to make something else. It’s something that is more and more common in France and maybe here too.”

Whether it’s common here, it hasn’t been common in the movies, at least not recently. Themes of work and identity are redolent of an earlier, perhaps more questioning time in such movies as “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and the memorable scene in “The Graduate” when an associate of the hero’s father sidles up to him and offers one word of advice, “plastics,” as if that’s the meaning of life.

Cantet has screened the film in festivals around the world, and most audiences respond to the point he’s making, proving “how powerful the idea is that the job is the most important thing in life.” However, in some cultures the centrality of work is so important that the film can’t even be shown. Two such places are Japan and South Korea. Distributors representing those countries told Cantet they wouldn’t pick up the film because “questioning the necessity of working is too subversive and they prefer not to show it.”

Cantet says Vincent is “trying to live the way he wants to live, to find this place that is not the place he’s been sent to, but the place where he would like to recognize himself.” To this end, Vincent fabricates a new job at the United Nations, a fiction that impresses his demanding father and that he works very hard at maintaining.

He diligently studies technical literature and discourses learnedly on it, much as if he actually worked at the U.N. To finance his unemployment, he lures friends into investing in a fraudulent get-rich-quick scheme. When this becomes insupportable, he hooks up with a con man who traffics in knockoffs. Vincent’s wife is not unaware that there’s something wrong here, but she dutifully supports him, even to the point of lying for him.

Ironically, all of Vincent’s deceptions are in the service of doing something meaningful with his life. Because, like most people, he isn’t actually doing that, he is prepared to do nearly anything in order to appear as if he is. This may sound adolescent or even pathological, and certainly the film plays on the idea that as the real world closes in on Vincent’s make-believe world, he could resort to violence, either to himself or to his family.

In fact, the film was inspired by the true story of Jean-Claude Romand, who dropped out of medical school, but convinced his family that he’d finished his studies and landed a job at the World Health Organization. When he was exposed in 1993, after 18 years of deception, he murdered his wife, children and parents and tried to kill himself. He is now in prison.

Cantet lifted certain elements of that story--for example, the fact that Romand claimed to be working in Geneva and that he financed his double life by running scams. But that’s as far as it goes.

“I didn’t want the film to be the report of the true story because it finished in a way that didn’t correspond to what I wanted to say in the film,” Cantet says. “My character is not psychotic, he’s not a killer, he’s someone maybe like you and me.”

Cantet, who co-wrote the script with Robin Campillo, is nothing like Vincent. He is clearly invested in his work. “Time Out” is his second film. His first, “Human Resources,” was set in a factory, which, together with “Time Out,” has prompted the New York Times to call him “France’s foremost cinematic poet of the workplace.” He lives in Paris and has two children, who appear in “Time Out” as Vincent’s younger children.

Obviously, these kids are a part of Cantet’s working life, not estranged from it, as is the case with most parents--and certainly with Vincent, who tells one son, “Nothing changed for you, nothing changed between us; why don’t you let me live the life I would like to live?”

Cantet is the first to admit that questioning the value of work is something only the affluent can afford. Many if not most people in the world live hand to mouth and are concerned about food, shelter, medical care and a stable society, not whether their job--if they have one--nourishes their soul.

It can also be argued that Vincent has fallen into a trap of his own making. He has started a family and must provide for it. Running away from that responsibility, no matter how stultifying it is, is not exactly heroic (though, to be fair, Cantet is not saying it is). Ironically, the only thing that gives his life any meaning is killing him.

“I like to imagine that the film says it’s a shame that you can’t choose,” Cantet says. “This sort of trap is something so cruel that it should be possible to live in another way.”