In theaters today, Like a Monday is the ideal comedy to make you forget the blues of your work week. As funny as it is touching, this first feature film is a real gem of Japanese cinema, worth discovering urgently!
The craziest week of their lives
Monday morning, Yoshikawa (Wan Marui) wakes up at his desk after spending the entire weekend working again. Under pressure, this young executive dedicates herself body and soul to her advertising job, even if it means sacrificing her personal life. But this week, she notices something is wrong…
Every little gesture, every event seems to repeat itself tirelessly. Could she and her agency colleagues be trapped in a time loop? Ready to do anything to free themselves from it and regain their freedom, they will have to work together to find the origin of this curse and get out of their routine.
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A funny, ingenious and touching first feature film
For their first feature film, director Ryo Takebayashi and screenwriter Saeri Natsuo have chosen a setting that is more than familiar to them. And for good reason, a few years before going behind the camera, they themselves were in the place of Yoshikawa and his colleagues, ignoring the time loop at the heart of the film.
“We were thinking about a workplace where employees are constantly subject to deadlines and we thought of an advertising agency, explain Ryo Takebayashito be as close as possible to a professional world that was familiar to us and to be able to best describe situations.”
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For these two former advertising agency employees, the plot of their first film project seemed obvious. In addition to their knowledge of the professional environment represented, the introduction of a time loop into the scenario made it possible to examine in depth the notion of repetitiveness and alienation in daily professional life.
“I always thought the time loop was a profound themedeclares Ryo Takebayashi citing Un Jour sans fin as a reference. It’s an unrealistic setting and story, but this film moves me so much. I wanted to succeed in preserving this feeling in Like a Monday, but was I able to transpose it to a weekly temporality?“
Transpose the success ofA Day Without End on a weekly scale, the filmmaker succeeds with flying colors by ingeniously multiplying the comic effects produced by the repetition of the same events and the variations in rhythm which surround their numerous occurrences, thus never tiring of his spectator. But where Ryo Takebayashi and screenwriter Saeri Natsuo manage to achieve excellence by matching the emotion of their model, signed Harold Ramis in 1993.
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Indeed, after its hilarious first half, Like a Monday takes on a powerful morality when the agency’s employees, surpassing their individuality, come together for the common good. Sublime reconciliation with the child’s soul that still lies dormant within them then becomes possible, as does overcoming the alienation that blinded them.
As funny as it is moving, Like a Monday, Ryo Takebayashi’s first film, can be seen in theaters now.