When you spend all day at work manually feeding documents into a copying machine one sheet at a time, you’re very seldom gonna have a positive comeback to that most irritating of co-worker smart-a*s remarks, “Having fun yet?” Come to think of it, odds are you’re so brain-dead, your synapses and neurons melting from this mindless task’s lack of mental stimulation, that you’ll be lucky if you can come up with any response at all. Just ask the bored-into-a-coma copy machine jockey (Mara Holguin) in Dylan Haggerty’s bleakly amusing corporate comedy “Questions and Answers.”
There’s no telling how long she’s been at her post when Ted Ramsey (Kent Osborne), the Marketing Director from the 17th Floor, bounds into her fluorescent-lit prison cell with the same annoying enthusiasm found in middle managers everywhere, and asks her that dreaded, stupidly innocuous question: “Having fun yet?”
Our heroine freezes, unable to come up with any sort of reply, snappy or otherwise. For reasons probably related to sniffing too many toner fumes, she then spends the rest of the afternoon and all that night obsessing on Ted’s throwaway question, intent on conjuring up a comeback if it kills her.
“Questions and Answers” is a wickedly comical short, featuring a marvelous turn by Holguin as the overwrought office drone. The film is a silent movie with subtitles conveying the dialogue, making the performances here all the more impressive. A squawking, strings-laden soundtrack conveys the silly yet ominous mood, while its cool blue tinting nicely captures the feel of its sterile, landmarkless, cubicle workplace world.
As ludicrous as it is vaguely depressing, “Questions and Answers” is a darkly comic slice of corporate humor; an outrageously raucous depiction of an overwrought woman’s nervous breakdown deep inside the Dilbert Zone.
