In "Time Out," the acting and writing are superb, the camera work always interesting, and the cello score haunting and melancholy. It is an oversimplification to say that this intelligent movie is about losing one's job and going to unethical extremes to make ends meet, for it is nothing less than a penetrating look at the conformity, alienation, and spiritual emptiness of modern life and how one man rebels against it. Vincent Renault doesn't simply get fired. He courts his firing because he is sick and tired of the shallow yuppie grind, his responsibilities to his young family, and the unrealistic expectations of his affectionate but controlling wife, his overbearing father, and his affluent circle of friends. He has experienced a crisis of confidence following a gradual loss of meaning, and for a guy who "functions on enthusiasm," it's too much to bear. He thus appears to be singularly unmotivated to deal with so-called reality. All he wants to do is "drive around, smoking and listening to the radio," with no obligations to anyone but himself. Sleeping in his car yet in constant touch with home by cell phone, he maintains the illusion of continued employment as a traveling consultant for the French company that terminated him because he can't face the disappointment of his family and friends nor stand up to their renewed pressures upon him. Knowing this facade of normality can't last for long, he invents an exciting new career in Switzerland, somewhat removed from their prying eyes, but the ruse only pushes him deeper into a self-destructive web of lies. Borrowing a large sum from his father "to get set up" and defrauding old acquaintances, he sidesteps the growing concern and suspicion of his wife and avoids the wide-eyed, vaguely accusing stares of his spoiled, middle class children. As he explains to a sympathetic Swiss hotelier, a worldliwise smuggler of cheap knockoffs, he is simply trying "to win some time" before he must face the inevitable. When it comes in the form of a resolution to his dilemma, we sense that his troubled soul has not been palliated in the least.