Hasn't Aged Well

When I came to this forum after watching this film, I had no idea that the most recent post after mine would be over a year-and-a-half old. I'd never heard of L'Emploi du Temps until I saw it on www.abetterqueue.com and streamed it on Netflix. It got very high marks as both a drama and thriller.

I was so underwhelmed and found the film sufficiently tedious that I had to break up segments of it over four days. Perhaps in 2001, the sterile Scandinavian home environment of the loon-protagonist was a big draw? This movie depended entirely on the "hero" [sic] and his ability to make the audience empathize with his situation, and in that it failed with me, totally. Whether the lead actor's smugness was natural or assumed really doesn't matter. He comes across as so mentally ill that he can't inspire the compassion necessary for such a stream-of-consciousness plot. Several critics remarked on how the second half of the film seemed unnatural in regard to plot, but the flaw in that criticism is assuming the film was supposed to have any plot at all. A full hour is spent wandering around the Rhone-Alpes region of France in the dark (Roger Ebert found this hour the best). Not until Vincent meets the counterfeiter does the film have any feeling other than smugness and the chill of psychopathology.

I can't for the life of me figure out how "Time Out" (very poorly translated from the original title) ever became so popular.

In the year 2525, someone will see this post.