The Big Picture: Time Out (PG), Sidewalks of New York (15)

Oh yes, he's a great pretender

The French director Laurent Cantet has now made two films, both centring upon the moral impact of unemployment, and both, in their unassuming way, masterpieces. His debut, Ressources Humaines (1999), examined social and industrial tensions in a Normandy factory where an idealistic young business graduate is implicated in the management's shafting of the workforce, the latter including his own blue-collar father. Cantet's new film Time Out (L'Emploi du Temps) also deals with a vexed father-son relationship, but in a context that is at once more ambiguous and unsettling.

Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) has lost his job as a middle-management executive but hasn't told his wife, children or parents. Instead, he lets his days drift by, wandering around hotel lobbies or humming along to the car radio, then phoning his wife to tell her about the various nonexistent meetings he has to attend. He begins to relish the deception; he pretends to have a new job that takes him to Geneva, working to help the African economy for the UN. When money runs short he takes to concocting an investment scam and embezzles funds from his friends and business associates.

The film is a study in alienation, but Cantet reaches into stranger, darker territory than one might expect. It is inspired by the real-life case of Jean-Claude Romand, who had spent 18 years pretending that he had a prestigious job at the World Health Organisation in Geneva while actually doing nothing but swindle money from unsuspecting investors in order to maintain a respectable lifestyle. The story had an horrific payoff: on being unmasked, Romand murdered his wife, children and parents before attempting (and failing) to kill himself. Cantet excises this atrocity from his adaptation, because his conception of Vincent is not to do with psychosis but with avoidance: Vincent wants to escape the constraints of work, and to do so he must act out a double life.

Time Out examines, tragicomically, how and where a man might exist outside the demands of employment. Car parks and lay-bys are Vincent's haunts, but even these quotidian settings aren't always the haven they appear: asleep in his car outside a hotel, he is woken by a night watchman who advises him to get a room or else clear off. During the day he bluffs his way into drab corporate spaces by dint of his disguise – suit, tie, briefcase – but when he wanders down a corridor of glassed offices he watches the people inside like a sightseer in an aquarium: he is intrigued by what it might take for someone to fit in. There's no bitterness here. The film isn't showing us a man "emasculated" by unemployment; on the contrary, Vincent seems weirdly exhilarated by the sense of truancy from life.

This is made explicit later when he talks about his former life to a louche old businessman, Jean Michel (Serge Livrozet) who has befriended him. He confesses that the only thing he really enjoyed about his old job was the long drives he had to make on his company's behalf; the self-forgetting behind the wheel of a car became so addictive that he kept on missing appointments. This odd contentment is wonderfully conveyed by Aurélien Recoing, an accomplished stage actor but largely unknown to cinema. His easy smile and pudgy, anonymous features are exactly right for Vincent, a man without qualities whom people instinctively trust. "We don't need a receipt from you," says another friend as Vincent pockets their hard-earned savings. Yet Recoing catches, too, the sadness of his self-delusion, and the fear of seeing his elaborate house of cards collapse. When an old colleague from work asks sympathetically how he's getting along, Vincent looks offended; he can't deal with reminders of his failure.

As Muriel, his wife, Karin Viard is extraordinarily subtle in her shifting reactions to her husband; at times she seems to know that Vincent is lying to her, yet she makes herself complicit in his charade, perhaps because at some level she too wants to believe in the outward respectability of his life. What might surprise is just how tense this duplicity becomes.

The slow accumulation of detail, reminiscent of Chabrol, and Jocelyn Pook's ominous string-laden score keep ratcheting up the unease. Vincent's eagerness to please – his wife, his family, his friends – ironically involves him in a subterfuge as stressful as the life he's been trying to escape. He wants freedom, but responsibility keeps stalking him. His fate remains elusive to the final frame, and beyond: is he stepping back into the trap of employment or plotting another escape?

Edward Burns's ensemble drama Sidewalks of New York is very obviously indebted to Woody Allen's romantic comedies, but while Woody's latest Curse of the Jade Scorpion languishes in distribution hell this is a more than adequate knock-off. Writer-director Burns also stars as nice guy Tommy, just another New Yorker trying to figure a way through the quicksands of love and sex. Not that he's short of advice: his pal (Dennis Farina) is an ageing roué always ready with some dubious pre-date tip, such as "spray your balls with cologne – it shows you care". Elsewhere, a 19-year-old student (Brittany Murphy) is miserably attached to a married philanderer (Stanley Tucci) but attracted to a doorman-cum-aspiring musician (David Krumholtz, a fun-size Allen schlemiel), while a realtor (Heather Graham) and a schoolteacher (Rosario Dawson) try to put bad marriages behind them.

Burns uses the slightly ho-hum device of direct-to-camera interviews, and sometimes overdoes the shaky camerawork and shrill argumentative style that characterised Husbands and Wives. Still, if you're going to steal, steal from the best, and Burns is markedly more affectionate and optimistic about romance than his famous master. He tends to like his characters, and even those he doesn't, like Tucci's love rat, he forgives. I notice that the New Yorker calls this film "the pits", so it's safe to assume it won't be universally admired. But it worked for me.