VSt was a Monday and – out of a sense of tautology – I went to see the film Like a Monday. This feature film, inspired by the cult A day without end by Harold Ramis (1993) and directed by Ryo Takebayashi, immerses us in the daily life of a small Japanese advertising agency. Trying to deliver, without success, an advertising campaign for a miso soup sold in effervescent tablets, the young creative Yoshikawa and her colleagues are stuck in a time loop, reliving the same week over and over again. If the time loop film has become a sub-genre in itself which is sometimes a little boring, we are quickly taken in by this daily life of an absurd open space which, in mirror image, takes us back to the repetitiveness of our own office life.
In the communications agency, it is a pigeon smashing against the window which marks the restart of the loop, based on power cuts, weekends spent at the office and constantly repeated gimmicks from the boss. Employees will gradually have to convince themselves that they are not in a normal daily life but in a situation resembling a quantum hiccup, before trying to get out of it. Overinvestment at work, sacrificing one’s personal life for professional success inept, the inclination to consent to a life that displeases us: all these themes run through this charming film, which teeters between naturalism and surrealism.
But what makes the contextual strength of Like a Monday, it’s his way of highlighting a new anxiety or, in any case, a fear that has taken on a new dimension in the employee’s unconscious: being stuck in the office. At once a piece of furniture, a room and an institution, the office is that thing to which we can be chained in multiple ways.
The relativistic power of the pandemic
In his Ethnology of the office (Métailié, 2020), Pascal Dibie recalls that theHomo sedens is an individual whose body has undergone training since childhood, emphasizing the bridge that exists between the submission of the mind and the obligatory static posture. But this “seated humanity”, whose consent we patiently forged, suddenly saw the four-legged foundations of its way of life falter, thanks to the relativistic power of the pandemic. ” What’s the point ? »we said to ourselves, realizing that we could just as easily think in shorts in the shade of a lime tree.
According to an OpinionWay study for Slack from 2023, 63% of employees today favor a job allowing them to work from the location of their choice and 50% of them are even ready to leave their job if there is an obligation to work. return in person every day (64% among 18-34 year olds). What is now valued is the feeling of freedom and the flexibility that teleworking offers to manage the obligations of everyday life (yes, that appointment with the ENT).
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