It was a Monday and – in a sense of tautology – I went to see the movie Mondays: See You 'This' Week! This feature film, inspired by Harold Ramis' 1993 cult classic Groundhog Day and directed by Ryo Takebayashi, immerses us in the day-to-day life of a small Japanese advertising agency. Trying but failing to come up with a campaign for miso soup sold in effervescent tablets, young creative Yoshikawa and her colleagues are trapped in a time loop, reliving the same week over and over again. While the time-loop film has become a sub-genre, sometimes a little tiresome, we are quickly caught up in this absurd open-space daily routine, which mirrors the repetitiveness of our own office life.

In the communication agency, it is a pigeon crashing into the window that starts the loop again, with power cuts, weekends spent in the office and the boss's gimmicks on repeat. Employees will have to gradually convince themselves that they are not in a normal day-to-day life, but in a situation that resembles a quantum hiccup, before trying to break out of it. Over-investment at work, the sacrifice of personal life for professional success, the inclination to consent to a life one dislikes: All these themes run through the charming movie, which sways between naturalism and surrealism.

But the contextual strength of Mondays: See You 'This' Week! lies in the way it highlights a new anguish, or at any rate, a fear that has taken on new importance in the employee's subconscious: being stuck at the office. At once a piece of furniture, a room, and an institution, the office is that thing to which one can be chained in a multitude of ways.

In his Ethnologie du Bureau ("Office Ethnology,"), Pascal Dibie points out that Homo sedens is an individual whose body has undergone training from childhood, underlining the bridge that exists between the submission of the mind and the obligatory static posture. But this "seated humanity," whose consent has been patiently forged, has suddenly seen the four-legged underpinnings of its way of life wobble, thanks to the relativistic power of the pandemic. "What's the point?" we wondered, realizing that we could just as easily think in shorts in the shade of a tree.

According to a 2023 OpinionWay study for Slack, 63% of employees prefer a job that allows them to work from the location of their choice, and 50% of them are even prepared to leave their job if they have to return in person every day (64% among 18-34 year-olds). What is now valued is the sense of freedom and flexibility that working remotely offers to manage everyday obligations (yes, that ENT appointment).

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