In Return to Office, the new project by designer and creative director Noah Sarkin, the office becomes an aquarium. A sterilised space hanging dozens of floors above Manhattan, where the protagonists move like creatures observed from outside, forced into a loop of minimal tasks and pointless protocols. Guiding them, and us, is a voiceover that sounds like an instruction manual for ideal workers: ‘Assemble printer. Inventory. Team building exercises.’ It is a litany of micro-tasks that becomes the true narrative pace of the film.
Sarkin says that the intent was ‘to distill the mundanity and repetition of the corporate world’, and the result is an accurate image of post-pandemic working life, in which returning to the office is more about surveillance rather than productivity. The choice of an almost completely empty environment with one single computer and an abandoned desk becomes a way of highlighting the absurdity of the corporate lifestyle. It is the space before something happens, or perhaps the space where nothing ever happens.
The wardrobe designed by Sarkin lives right on the edge between formality and individuality. The pieces are designed for the corporate environment while subtly rejecting it, as if the wearers were in uniform and out of uniform at the same time.
Director Cole Borgstadt says he wanted to keep everything “underplayed with a level of normalcy”. But in this normality, fashion itself becomes a storytelling element, with clothing becoming the only means through which personality and irony emerge.
Czarnowski talks about wanting to capture the feeling of looking at New York buildings ‘like ants in an ant farm’, and the effect is exactly that. The protagonists become elements of the urban landscape, caged in a vertical terrarium where time is circular.
Camille Delaune’s photography which accompanies the project amplifies the film’s liminal look. Delaune speaks of a balance between “a sense of playfulness” and an environment that is “intentionally sterile and masculine”. Her images create micro-spaces, like small theatrical scenes in which the corporate is reversed into something intimate, almost childlike. The models lie on the carpet among accounting books, practically not working but playing at work.
Return to Office speaks to the relentless performativity of women in corporate spaces, forced to be efficient and productive but also collaborative and pleasant. The result is a sharp commentary on the return to the office as spectacle, a continuous performance for the benefit of an invisible observer.