The office was slightly futuristic in decor. like nothing i've ever seen, definately paying homage to the golds and reds of the baroque europe. But nestled in the cracks of all this deep deep retro was hordes of "friendly" technology: the kind of benign technological warm humanly security of control that the sci-fi technophile dreams of. This was still not enough to deter my interest and appreciation of what was taking place in this movie, because its brilliance was so unspeakably subtle. The shameless challennge that this movie posed to the imagination worked on two levels; more perfectly on each than i will be able to explain here.
First, gender roles were in all cases reversed. Though there may have been equal numbers of men and women in the firm, the women had all the power, and had always had it. The men were trying to squirm in and would bravely establish themselves here & there, if only for short periods. Maybe they were making headway. It was too soon to tell. The women ran the show, particularly the Japanese woman (Ito?) whose black frilled dress evidenced a cocky sexuality which did not need to be used for anything, and had no desire to be. It existed only for its own satisfaction. She hurled lewd sexual invectives around the office and at her men-slaves, leaving them with the unpalatable options of sleeping with her and being used and useless and discarded, or playing hard-to-get with their sexuality in order to vye for some second-rate power, or actually telling her to get lost (none of them, perhaps, really wanted her) and losing all standing in the Company.

Several of her exploits and those of other women around the office were attended to by a plotline that was increasingly overshadowed in dramatic effect by the second layer of operational intrigue being tested by the film: what one realized, sooner or later, was that the camera itself was female--and had always been so. It is tough to explain exactly how this was conveyed, but teh most vivid and obvious example was the contrast in nudity exposure. There was no female nudity. Only male. Penises were regularly and sometimes even awkwardly revealed; there was a fascination with the male body that operated clothed or not. Men were caught awkwardly flirting and being cute. Women were not.

the plot eventually parted ways with Ito and followed in fast forward the exploits of a married couple in the firm and all the dysfunctionalities that followed from the fact that they were locked in a value-hierarchical social system that devalued maleness (and had always done so), despite all valiant efforts on their part to overcome this. As they aged, they grew bitter and grey, and the woman began to go bald. In a heated scene in a shaded meeting room, just the two of them, she began to exploit him sexually. I entered the scene, somehow, and she began, balding crazed matron, to play me against him. She demanded that i have sex with her, and as the camera followed my exploited phallus, i, male subject, under the duress of 2500 years of subjugation, consummated the act.