★★★½
“Do not mess with Japanese office ladies.”
If you took a pinky violence movie, stripped out the sex, and relocated it from high school to a corporation… Yeah, it’s kinda like that. For the Mitsufuji company has most of the women who work there, divided into what are basically gangs. Sales has one, R&D another, and so on. They battle for supremacy – and not in an “office politics” kind of way, but with their fists and feet. The male workers appear largely oblivious to this, as long as the company’s work gets done. New employee Naoko Tanaka (Nagano) looks to stay out of trouble, but befriends another new worker, Ran Hojo (Hirose), who quickly cleans house and rises to the top of Mitsufuji.
However, this only puts her on the radar of another business, Tomsun, under the spectacularly flamboyant Ryoko Akagi (Endo) – all their champions are played by men in drag, which you get to decide, is either funny or offensive. After Ran gets her butt kicked, Nao has to step up. For, it turns out, she isn’t exactly the quiet office lady she appears to be. But behind even Akagi is the ultimate end boss of Reina Onimaru (below). She’s played by Eiko Koike, who close to twenty years earlier was one of the leads in 2LDK – one of the earliest Japanese films I reviewed on this site. I’m not sure if this casting was a deliberate callback. But in such a clearly self-aware film, I’d not be surprised.
Hat-tip to Denis on YouTube for pointing me to this one, which somehow had escaped my notice. To be fair, it doesn’t seem to have received much of a formal Western release. Perhaps because if you are not aware of the elements of Japanese culture being parodied, it might border on the impenetrable. I’m fairly aware, and suspect significant chunks flew well over my head. Yet I found a lot to enjoy. In particular, the way Nao’s grandmother, the OG OL (as it were), provides martial-arts training, using secretarial skills like copying and answering the telephone. It’s a spot-on parody of kung-fu movies, down to the final test, where the graduating student has to fight a bear. Yes: a bear.
My main complaint would be the running joke which has much of the action taking place just off-screen, while Nao goes about her work. This eventually becomes annoying instead of amusing, and feels like a cop out. There are some good set pieces, although this falls notably short of the Baby Assassins franchise in this department. Where it scores are in the characters, and some lovely production design, which really captures the feeling of working for a large corporation. These aspects are certainly good enough to make me forgive the roughly eleven thousand times, Nao’s voiceover explicitly points out how what’s unfolding is just like a manga storyline. A few flaws from a seal of approval, yet remains an unexpected and groovy spoof.
Dir: Kazuaki Seki
Star: Mei Nagano, Alice Hirose, Kenichi Endo, Nanao
a.k.a. Office Royale