Cantet, who died earlier this year was, for a while, one of the most feted directors on the planet. Looking at his IMDB page, it looks as though things might have started to go awry when he directed Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, in 2012, adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates novel. Up to then his cerebral, measured movies were big festival hitters. L'emploi du temps, a title I suspect is a pun, although my French isn’t quite good enough to confirm this, is a slow burn drama which looks at corporate life and the capitalist world. Vincent, a dreamy misfit, lies to everyone about his career. Unemployed, he constructs a narrative about another job working for a development agency in Geneva, where he theoretically helps small African start-ups. In reality he’s fleecing his former acquaintances by falsely promising to invest their savings in emerging Eastern European markets, as well as getting caught up in a smuggling business. Vincent thereby positions himself at the most dubious edges of the capitalist Ponzi scheme, which helps him maintain his wife and family in their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle. All of his is slightly thematic, and the narrative perhaps sags under the weight of the film’s ambitions, but L'emploi du temps nevertheless represents an attempt to puncture the creeping materialist comfort of affluent Europe, a companion piece to Hanecke’s more radical Seventh Continent.
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