Time Out
With Aurelien Recoing, Karin Viard, Serge Livrozet, Jean-Pierre Mangeot, Monique Mangeot, Nicolas Kalsch, Marie Cantet, Felix Cantet, and Maxime Sassier.
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This point is only underscored when, relatively late in the film, we hear him describe how and why he lost his job, and we realize that he had inexplicably fallen in love with his own drift, which he experiences basically by driving. (Throughout the film the recurring point-of-view shots from behind the windshield of his moving car reflect his shifting states of mind, whether easygoing or turbulent.) Like the hero of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Vincent can’t be said to have a life in the usual sense; more precisely, he inhabits one.
After describing the plot of “Wakefield” in an essay about Hawthorne Jorge Luis Borges noted, “In that brief and ominous parable, which dates from 1835, we have already entered the world of Herman Melville, of Kafka–a world of enigmatic punishments and indecipherable sins. You may say that there is nothing strange about that, since Kafka’s world is Judaism, and Hawthorne’s, the wrath and punishments of the Old Testament. That is a just observation, but it applies only to ethics, and the horrible story of Wakefield and many stories by Kafka are united not only by a common ethic but also by a common rhetoric. For example, the protagonist’s profound triviality, which contrasts with the magnitude of his perdition and delivers him, even more helpless, to the Furies.” (He goes on to note, “‘Wakefield’ prefigures Franz Kafka, but Kafka modifies and refines the reading of ‘Wakefield.’ The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his own precursors.”)
It’s worth adding that all of the actors in this film apart from Recoing and Viard are nonprofessionals (one of the characteristics we associate with Italian neorealism). Vincent’s two youngest children, a girl and a boy, are played by Cantet’s own kids, and Vincent’s parents are played by a real couple. Furthermore, Recoing and Viard’s acting meshes seamlessly with that of the amateurs; all of the characters reveal things about themselves through body language, and the climactic scene when Vincent confronts his family after they discover his deception is a remarkable series of acute emotional observations. Cantet’s previous feature, Human Resources (1999), showed how well he understands family dynamics, particularly the tensions that can exist between a father and son.
The marvel of the film is that, like its hero and his literary cousins, it’s simple to the point of being insipid, yet what it winds up saying proves to be bottomless–a conclusion one might arrive at only long after seeing it. For 132 minutes, we follow this dull company man without a company as he drives around, talking on his cell phone to everyone he cares about, spinning inventions about what he’s doing. Cantet seduces us not only into understanding but sharing his dilemma. He wants us to be appalled yet sympathetic, and he succeeds largely because he’s found a way to make his story seem paradoxically monotonous and gripping, familiar and peculiar, all at the same time.
