Pros
- Enjoyable story of collaboration and companionship
- Some surprises throughout story
- Interesting take on protagonist of story
Cons
- A plot hole regarding one employee that doesn’t quite make sense
Mondays See You ‘This’ Week! Review
The parallels between Mondays See You ‘This’ Week (2022) and its inspiration from the now classic comedy time loop movie, Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, are difficult to ignore. While Murray’s day repeats, the employees of a small advertising agency find themselves trapped in a repeating week.
The movie stars Wan Marui as a young employee named Yoshikawa at a cramped office with apathetic coworkers who are going through the motions of life and living up to social expectations and contracts. The movie makes no effort in glossing over some of the less appealing aspects of Japanese work life: sleeping in the office overnight, appeasing demanding and often fickle clients, and the expectation of sacrifice for the greater good—the company.
So it’s no surprise that within this environment, Yoshikawa feels stifled and confined, restricted from reaching her full potential. Yoshikawa is unable to pursue her dream of working at a larger, more reputable agency because of the workload and stricter Japanese business hierarchy. Yoshikawa’s dream illustrates the extent to which her thinking is constrained to the culture: she wishes not to travel the world or to discover a cure for cancer. No. She dreams of working at a larger company.
At first glance, being stuck in a repeating week in this environment may make the movie seem more like a drama than a comedy: how can these characters escape from the hell wherein they’re trapped? But like most time loop movies, and perhaps of all great stories, is to allow characters the opportunity to learn about themselves and to grow, much like Murray’s character, Phil Connors, developed in Groundhog Day.
The premise of Mondays See You ‘This’ Week! isn’t necessarily new, nor are the motivations and desires of the characters to escape their time loop. However, throughout their many times experiencing the loop and perfecting their work for clients, Yoshikawa and her coworkers come to realize that there is more to life than the relentless grind of work, and it’s this realization that further motivates them to find a way to escape the time loop.
When the cause of the time loop is suspected, Yoshikawa slowly recruits the rest of the office workers by breaking them out of the loop with the help of an unfortunate pigeon. This simple, but impactful, event acts as a wake-up and reminder for the office, and true to the Japanese hierarchy, they work their way up through to their boss, a middle-aged man suffering perhaps from a mid-life crisis.
One later reveal about an employee escaping the time loop seems a bit out of place considering no one else remembers, but this minor intrusion is later integrated with the rest of the story.
What’s unique about the movie isn’t that the protagonist, Yoshikawa, is the hero of the story. In fact, while the story centers around Yoshikawa, the real central figure is someone else. For most stories, the protagonist is the hero around whom the events occur. But not here—in fact, Yoshikawa, or any of her coworkers, could have been the central figure.
When everyone learns of the cause of the time loop, none of the characters question why. Are they are all “background” characters who serve to populate a world that sees this figure as the “main hero” of the story that is their reality? No, such philosophical questions are left for others.
Instead, Yoshikawa and her colleagues gather together and finally, honestly, work with one another toward a shared goal instead of going through the motions of work. And they use the tools of their trade to escape: whiteboards, presentations, and illustrations. Through this collaboration, they learn some important lessons about life, including the lesson that it’s okay to be a little selfish when it comes to one’s life. Toward this end, one character admits that he’s booked a vacation in Spain once they finally escape.
Monday See You ‘This’ Week! won’t surprise viewers with some novel revelations about life, nor will it leave viewers pondering the deeper philosophical questions regarding existence. But it will remind viewers that perhaps there’s more to life than the daily drudgery of work: that perhaps work isn’t life and that perhaps work is a means to enjoying life.
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