One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Office (2015) is showing July 26 – August 24, 2020 on MUBI in the United States.
The camera swoops up on the lyrical laments of two high-level careerists, dwarfed and backgrounded by the least subtle metaphor for capitalist grind. Waning golden boy David (Eason Chan), screwed after losing $20 million in company funds, and accountant Sophie (Wei Tang), dumped by her fiance for prioritizing work, just had a meet-cute contrived and earnest as the duet they’ve broken into. At first glance mistakable for a Modern Times-themed Armani campaign, the blatant staginess and uncanny lighting of the moment feels barely believable, even amateurish. With Johnnie To’s Office, unnaturalness isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature. Facing the present repercussions of 2008’s subprime mortgage crisis, our minds slip off realities vast as “$600 billion in bankrupted assets” and “9 million jobs lost.” To’s layers of simulacra abstract the catastrophe into something comprehensible. Keeping the staging of Office’s earlier incarnation (Sylvia Chang’s 2009 play Design for Living), but avoiding staginess with his kinetic camera (here spiced with Busby Berkeley-esque choreography), To adds the paradox of musicals, where flagrant unreality makes room for deeper emotional resonance. To’s high-finance fascination evolved over the years, from grave morality tale Life Without Principle (2011) to Fortune 500 screwball romance retread Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 (2014), with Office (2015), the supreme flight of fancy of financial misdoings. Its artifice transcends logic, yet accurately exposes the characters’’ wireframe panopticon as a voluntary prison. The set’s gesture of an office is a world where life is totum pro parte of brands, luxury objects as tangible success for corporate climbers too busy keeping up to actually live. Even out on the office “roof,” David and Sophie are stuck within. For all their striving and self-loathing, their song is sincere—though the shared, clear-sighted admission of what they eagerly sacrificed cements their downfall. Watching this moment in 2020, realizing those responsible for our fiscal misery would do it all again for the same material gains, To’s progression makes sense. First as tragedy, then as farce, finally as musical; abstracting the ongoing disaster is the only way to process it.