Office – first look

It seemed inevitable that Johnnie To would make a musical. His films have become increasingly known for their classical craftsmanship, and 2008’s Sparrow, about a band of pickpockets who fall for the same femme fatale, had the grace and whim of a great Minnelli or Demy.

What couldn’t have been so easily predicted was that To’s take on the musical wouldn’t further embrace his classical instincts, but would take him to post-modern extremes beyond what was hinted at in his recent (and masterful) rom-coms Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and Romancing in Thin Air and merge that with the venomous social critique of his recession thriller Life without Principle. And it’s in 3D.

Office (Hua Li Shang Ban Zou aka Design for Living, 2015)

The film takes place mostly in a corporate high-rise (on the 71st floor), on a set that would make Jacques Tati proud: it’s a completely artificial gridlock of metal, plastic and computers, prison-like in its oppressive modernist design of intersecting lines. The epicentre of the office is a gigantic gyro clock, the cogs of which suggest a metaphor for the rapidly typing employees sat in rows around it. The soundstage’s black floors and background are visible at all times. It’s a playful choice, one that may simply seem in step with the exuberant ambitions of a workplace musical, but which additionally creates a sense of isolation around the players and their playground in this financial sector, removed from reality.

The plot concerns two new assistants who start new jobs at the financial firm Jones & Sunn. Lee Xiang is an earnest young man who naively enters the world of high finance with noble intentions. Kat on the other hand has a secret: that she’s the daughter of the boss (Chairman Ho Chung-ping, played by Chow Yun-Fat). Meanwhile her mother is in a coma, and the Chairman’s affair with his fellow office honcho Miss Chang (Sylvia Chang, whose play Design for Living is the basis for the film) is one of the main conversation points amongst their colleagues. As sparks begin to fly between Lee Xiang and Kat, they must balance their budding romance with their own Ayn Randian self-interest. Strategic allegiances and ruthless ladder-climbing encroach on the would-be sincerity of the film’s various couplings.

Office

The handful of tunes in the film are hit or miss, but it’s hard not to admire their uncoolness (they’re the least modern part of the film). The songs’ subjects however are always fascinating. In one memorable sequence workers in a crowded restaurant ask themselves: “Are you willing to be a corporate slave?” amidst other woeful expressions of the life of survival in a competitive capitalist society.

In another sequence our protagonist irons his work clothes at home, singing about how he wants to rise in the business world and be a productive member of society, his bedroom the only illuminated part of the frame – but where its walls should be, we see through to the surrounding soundstage, where at the end of the scene the silhouette of a hunched-up homeless person slowly pushing a shopping cart comes into view.

From this point on To really lets rip, skewering the moral ignorance and existential bankruptcy with which his characters flirt as they plunge deeper into a world purely made of dollar signs.