Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns to American theaters this weekend with Tokyo Sonata, another of his portraits of social loneliness and estrangement in which the head of a disintegrating nuclear family conceals unemployment from his relatives by pretending to head to the office every morning. It’s a ruse previously featured front-and-center in Laurent Cantet’s superlative Time Out, a similar study of existential detachment in which nondescript middle-aged businessman Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) loses his job and responds by fancifully concocting – and then telling his suspicious wife about – a nonexistent new one at the United Nations. Cantet presents corporate France as an impersonal hell made up of cool, reflective surfaces and Vincent’s actions as desperate attempts to achieve autonomy not available in his professional environment. His contentment with his make-believe life, evidenced by his turning down more than one real job offer, as well as his use of a cozy country cabin as his fake office, both speak to his increasingly comfortable retreat into fantasy. The more Vincent lies, however, the more obvious it becomes that even this counterfeit life of freedom requires, ironically, a considerable amount of work. As details about its protagonist’s situation come into clearer focus, Time Out’s thriller-esque affectations prove somewhat less riveting. Yet there’s no shortage of chills in the film’s unhurried, transfixing social-realist depiction of the anomie fostered by modern capitalism, of one man’s inability to separate his identity from his vocation, and of the untenable deceptions in which he eventually cocoons himself as a means of coping with shame and humiliation.

TIME OUT TRAILER

And, also, a trailer for Tokyo Sonata: