L'Emploi du Temps /Time Out (2001, Laurent Cantet) and L'Adversaire/The Adversary (2002, Nicole Garcia)

In 1993 Jean-Claude Romand, a seemingly well-respected and wealthy French doctor claiming to work for the World Health Organisation, murdered his wife, two children and elderly parents when his lies and deception were about to be uncovered. This true story provided the inspiration for two French films: 2001's L'Emploi du Temps (Time Out) and the following year's L'Adversaire based on Emmanuel Carrere's bestseller.

L'Emploi du Temps (Time Out):

Two different approaches to the source material result in two very different films. L'Emploi du Temps takes the Romand case as a starting point to explore a man’s relation to his work and how it defines him as a father, a husband, a son and as a man.

In L’Emploi du Temps Aurelien Recoing plays Vincent, fired from his office job at the start of the film and who invents an imaginary job in preference to admitting his failure to his family. He spends his days driving around France and Switzerland pocketing his friends’ money in a bogus investment scheme to fund his deception. Recoing carries the film, in his interactions with his unsuspecting family or as he meets a number of odd characters on his travels through the motorways and motels almost in the manner of a European road movie.

Cantet uses the Romand case to produce a film more drama than thriller. It shows well the emasculating effect that unemployment can have on a person’s sense of self and self-worth without coming across as either didactic or moralistic. The film treats Vincent’s plight with understanding as to why he should have chosen to lie to save face though never completely shying away from showing him as a sometimes desperate and weak man. L’Emploi du Temps is leavened with some moments of light relief and a possibly optimistic ending.

L'Adversaire:

In L'Adversaire Daniel Auteuil plays Jean-Marc Faure, a version of Jean-Claude Romand in all but name who as a family man and imposter treats his lies as a way of life until he is left with no way out except committing the most heinous of crimes. Auteuil is like a character out of a Patricia Highsmith novel simultaneously desperate to carry on the charade but also subconsciously doing everything he can to expose the subterfuge in which he has entrapped himself. Initially it seems as if Auteuil hopes his deception is exposed so he can confess all but the deeper he gets the more unable he is to extricate himself from his situation.

Faure is a both a failure and a coward, unable to face up to his responsibilities and admit that he never qualified as a doctor but instead drives around aimlessly (like L’Emploi du Temps the film shows the sheer boredom inherent in living such a lie ) pretending to attend his office or bogus conferences. During one scene we see him sitting in a motorway car-park pointlessly highlighting sentences in a medical textbook as if such behaviour lends veracity to his dreams of a high-flying medical career. We never fully get to the bottom of why Auteuil’s character needs to pass himself off as a bogus doctor though we get hints that his upbringing as the smart son of a forester has left him ashamed of his humble background. Like L’Emploi’s Vincent, he begins swindling his family and his father-in-law out of their life-savings to fund an increasingly extravagant life-style.

Auteuil, in a rare dark role, is excellent as the fantasist devoid of emotion coldly eating dinner while his murdered family lies dead upstairs.
In this more thriller-like treatment of the Romand case L’Adversaire shows the darkness behind the bourgeois dream of a bigger house and a better car and how in deceitfully acquiring these material things he ends up destroying both himself and his family.