Educational Media Reviews Online

Véronique Jadin’s first feature length narrative film from Belgium gives us the office revenge comedy, Employee of the Month. It sits nicely inside a motion picture subgenre depicting workplaces as hell (one thinks of the film, 9 to 5, or television’s The Office), and some in film and television studies many wish to investigate its place within that genre. But this is thin viewing material for most screenings taking place within an educational or research context. It is also a farce that nonetheless buries some central themes in a self-contradicting tone, and a bit too many under-developed characters, plus a notable uncertainty regarding whether it is or is not being satirical.

Ines (Jasmina Douieb) is a paralegal and all-around multipurpose office administrator of over seventeen years at the cleaning company EcoClean Pro, and is desperate for greater opportunity and a pay raise. She has been as entirely abused by her boss Patrick (Peter Van Den Begin) as some mishandled jug of spilled floor cleaner. Ines and intern Melody (Laetitia Mampaka) carry the action forward and both deliver superb performances. We also learn Melody’s professor and a friend of Patrick's, Claude DeGroot (Sebastian Moradiellos), has sexually assaulted her. Patrick’s similar inclinations kick off a series of dark comedic homicides ranging from unintended to deliberate. Most characters in Employee of the Month are unfortunately under-developed, and the film slows a little too much in its third act with interventions by those investigating EcoClean Pro’s financial shenanigans. The pregnant financial crimes investigator Van Duyne (Ingrid Heiderscheidt) is maybe an homage to the Coen Brother’s Marge Gunderson, but not given all that much revealing to say. These victims and perpetrators are as trapped as the series of goldfish whose short life spans inside Ecoclean's small office aquarium act to install at those offices a fake rendition of the natural world. This is a firm all too happy with cutting corners in its accounting practices. The sort of enterprise that runs on misogyny and bad coffee.

A lack of character building in favor of a more surface observational type of farcical caper comedy stumbles into a nihilism that may even disturb some viewers more than intended, particularly in our era of far too many horrific mass shootings, including killings at office environments. Employee of the Month has an uncertain feeling in wanting to be a deadpan commentary about the crippling commodification of human labor (the doubletalk of inscrutable annual performance planning meetings), or on the other hand, a liberating throat slashing attack upon patriarchy and office privilege (think of a recontextualization of the gleeful murders in Heathers, swapping in the office as the setting, instead of high school). If the suggestion is that our commercial environments tend to create amoral drones, the cartoonish treatment of farce and sticking with portrayals of many of the characters as surface level comic book like figures, leans a bit too heavily in the direction of a crime cover-up caper to seriously consider that other possible commentary.

When Melody feels her alliance with Ines may be threatened and points out to her that, “you would rather kill people than ask for a raise,” there is even the possibility Ines was always destined to be a killer, even had she faced a less harsh corporate ladder. This hollowness associated with a workplace as a virtual internment camp, together with attendant abuses, has been well handled comedically in other films. The mixed approaches in Employee of the Month of workplace revenge tale, alongside crime caper farce, are difficult to corral in assessing this otherwise earnest feature. Is the filmmaker cultivating a tone associated with, say, the Coen Brothers, or the wacky antics of the Marx Brothers? There can be awkwardness in how the film at times switches between being deadpan and being startling, together with peppering in just a very few tender moments between Ines and Melody.

For the nihilism large and small in this comedy, which certainly invites us to consider how put down are so many women inside so many workplaces, the tone seems too muddled in weaving back and forth between satire or critique and observation and comedic reportage. It’s full sweep of characters being given more to do and say, including villains and victims, probably would have taken this film toward a more satisfying peak. For what also appears aimed at presenting its points of view by being a black comedy, it is less than satisfying to see that tact moderated by falling back into a series of largely surface slapstick, farcical comedies of error. Containing no lack of creativity in concept, skillful albeit conservative and crisp production design, and a strong pair of lead performances by Douieb and Mampaka, one continues to ask about the movie's tone, what does this film wish to be, a dark awakening or a light romp?

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