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Ryo Takebayashi (director), Mondays: See You “This” Week!, 2022. 102 min.

Ryo Takebayashi’s time-loop film Mondays: See You “This” Week!’s most obvious film of comparison is Groundhog Day (1993) and its characters, the staff of a small Tokyo advertising agency, are fully aware of it, referencing the film when they realise they are living out the same day ad infinitum. The loop is marked every day by an ill-fated pigeon crashing into the office window, and the staff look down on the junction below to see the same young woman every day hesitate at a zebra crossing.

^{An ill-fated pigeon}

The agency’s boss Mr Nagahisa (played by the splendidly monikered comic actor Makita Sports) is the only one who appears to be oblivious to the daily repetition, so weathered is he by the daily office grind. Initially, his underlings think a jade bracelet he has started wearing to the office is responsible for the loop but after they destroy it they find the pigeon continues to brain itself off the windowpane and the same young woman dallies down in the street.

The workers then turn their attentions to an unfinished manga manuscript that they think might be responsible. It happens to be the youthful work of their boss, who has long since cast aside his creative ambitions. All the office drones team up to finish the comic, ultimately enlisting the help of the boss, whom they manage to make aware of the temporal bind only by repeating the same PowerPoint presentation on successive days (the joke being that the managerial class can only process information when it’s broken down on slides for them).

Mondays: See You “This” Week! is a pleasingly zany piece of fluff that does a lot less with the potential of time looping than most other films of the genre do, yet despite the pervasive slightness, it’s hard to dislike. There may be a thinly veiled jab in there at Japanese culture of overworking but it’s a theme that is not sustained for all that long. Probably the central message is one of collective co-operation, which comes to influence the career decision of the central character Akeri (Wan Marui), an ambitious young woman tasked with a project for a snooty big-name designer, which she hopes will be her big break. A fun film that is likely to find its niche as a cult classic, to be watched over and over again, no doubt.

How to cite: Farry, Oliver. “Over and Over—Ryo Takebayashi’s Mondays: See You ‘This’ Week.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 5 Jun. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/06/05/mondays.

Oliver Farry is from Sligo, Ireland. He works as a writer, journalist, translator and photographer. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New Republic, The Irish Times, Winter Papers, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and gorse, among other publications. Visit his website for more information. [All texts by Oliver Farry.] [Oliver Farry and chajournal.blog.]

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