Posted in: Movies | Tagged: drug war, film, japan, johnny to, office

From A Drug War To A Very Musical Office – Look! It Moves! By Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 28 Sep 2015 08:15:32 -0500

Office is the latest movie from Johnny To to get worldwide simulataneous release, and like his last movie, Drug War, is getting rave reviews from US critics.

Where Drug War was one of the best crime movies of the last few years, Office is a musical. Not only that, it's a musical about the financial world. Set in 2008 on the eve of the global financial crisis, the story revolves around the staff at a Hong Kong investment firm on the verge of going public, with its cast of banking executives and their love affairs running parallel with the ups and downs of doing business.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiOMMFIa_hE[/youtube]

The nature of musicals as a genre is that they're supposed to be inherently bright and optimistic – why else would the characters burst into song? What sets Office apart is the use of the genre for some surprisingly pointed social commentary. Adapted from star and writer Sylvia Chang's stage play Design for Living, narrowed down from the four-hour version to a two-hour movie musical, Johnny To orchestrates the proceedings like a dance, the camera circling and gliding around the characters as their situations get increasingly tangled and complicated. Sylvia Chang plays the company CEO who's having an affair with the chairman, played by Chow Yun Fat, whose wife is in a coma. There's the wheeler-dealer played by Eason Chan who cooks the books and has an affair with an unhappily-engaged co-worker played by Tang Wei. The chairman's Ivy League-educated daughter has joined the company at entry level under a different name to learn the workings of the business. She falls in with the eager new recruit who serves as the audience entry point, his enthusiasm and can-do attitude remind me of characters in 1950s Hollywood musicals set in the business world as directed by Frank Tashlin. The set, designed by William Chang, who also designed Wong Kar Wai's movies, is reminiscent of the modernist office set of Jacques Tati's Playtime. This is a movie acutely aware of movie history while having its own story and its own ideas.

There's an exuberance to the acting, the direction and the design that you expect form a musical, but it's actually amazingly bleak. The cold, steel-and-glass design of the office set feels like a cage the workers are trapped inside. They're all prisoners of the financial system, prisoners of Capitalism. Their tangled and dysfunctional love lives are portrayed as a symptom of the System. The dialogue and lyrics are almost Brechtian in their commentary about money and commerce and working for both. There's no sense of the characters having lives outside the job. An after-hours drinking-and-bonding session becomes a musical number where they sing enthusiastically about working and making money. Eason Chan's dodgy grifter lives and dies by his dodgy moves as he heads towards comeuppance. Even Ms. Chang's relationship with the chairman doesn't keep her safe from the changing tides of fortune as the company heads into the crisis that hit every financial institution in the world.

It's interesting that Hollywood struggles to make any movies about finance that feel accessible to audiences while Hong Kong has been going whole-hog for years, especially when it comes to using the 2008 global crisis as a backdrop. Johnny To had previously done that with his noir thriller Life Without Principle. Alan Mak and Felix Chong's Overheard 2 was a twisty thriller that explains how the stock market works and how insider trading can affect the entire fabric of society. Maybe Asian audiences feel more directly connected to the financial system than Western audiences do, so they can relate to these movies. That's not to say that financial settings for movies are easy. Otherwise there would be a lot more movies with the subject. That so many Hong Kong movies use the 2008 crisis as a basis for movies is especially interesting. They all call out the fact that the financial world is broken, unfair and cold. None of them celebrate Capitalism but fall short of calling for a change in the system or overthrowing it, so you can't call them leftist or Marxist. They're mainstream entertainment made under a capitalist system, after all. However, that doesn't make these movies any less fun or entertaining or valuable culturally.

By the end, the characters in Office are still trapped in their world, their steel cage. Only one of them has been reluctantly kicked up, is free, but will miss it. And we are that character, hurled out of that world after all the good times and bad, into the light, seeing only one system without an alternative. Its alternate title could be "Happiness and Heartbreak in the time of Financial Crisis".

Alas, Office has ended its limited theatrical run in the US, but it's almost certainly going to come to streaming services in a few months.

Trapped in the office at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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