(1.5 / 5)
They’re the places that, for better or worse, occupy (or rather we occupy for) most of our waking hours.
It’s perhaps surprising then that the common-or-garden workplace doesn’t feature more prominently in cinema. Sure, there’s the bureaucracy-bound comedy of Office Space, the coked-up sexcapades of Wolf of Wall Street, or the Kafkaesque delirium of Brazil — but they’re rarely characterised as productive working environments.
The Hong Kong finance services firm of Jones & Sunn, however, as it appears in Johnny To’s Office, feels like Margin Call: The Musical, albeit with less focus on financial drama and more on interpersonal — or should that be inter-personnel — matters.
Based on the stage-play “Design for Living” by Sylvia Chang, the office in question is a multi-tiered Cubist concoction; an abstract, grid-like structure whose only truly solid elements are the individual desks with their Dell PCs and the individuals sat behind them.
Newly arrived among their ranks are interns Lee Xiang (Wang Ziyi), eager and efficient — “Lee as in Ang Lee, Xiang as in dream” — and the mysteriously overqualified, over-privileged Kat (Lang Yueting).
As the corporation prepares to go public, their reckless supervisor David Wang (Eason Chan) struggles to get the books in order amidst dreams of plummeting elevators, whose romantic frisson with the overworked Sophie Lu (Tang Wei) is tempered by his ongoing flirtation with hard-nosed CEO, Winnie Chang (writer Chang).
She is, in turn, is mistress to the immaculate Chairman (Chow Yun-Fat), who occasionally drifts through with an air of benevolence about him.
As befits its origins, Office is a glossy, self-consciously theatrical dramatization of Chinese work culture and the global financial market as it stood on the precipice of 2008. Meeting in bars after work to moan about their long hours or gossip about the office bimbo — Ka-ling (Tien Hsin), in full Marilyn Mode — they believe they will be rewarded, that their fortunes are bound to rise. Even Lee, still on probation, can ride the elevator or catch the ear of Chang.
With its abstract sets more recalling Nine or Chicago, characters attend meetings, and are respectively betrayed, promoted, overlooked, resign or are let go as romances blossom and die, and the giant, revolving clock at the center of the lobby ticks ever on.
Still, without any particularly memorable tunes, though, let alone a real showstopper, and characters with less depth than the 3D, musicals should be more fun than two hours with Office.
