Office Romance

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• JPRetana

  Jennifer Lopez as the CEO of an airline is hard to buy. Hey, don’t look at me; the makers of Office Romance (2026) themselves didn’t have faith in that premise — but I’m getting ahead of myself. Harder to swallow is that Jackie Cruz (Lopez) can provoke raging hard-ons just by shaking hands. Who is she supposed to be? The Blue Pill Fairy? Maybe they should have made her the CEO of Pfizer. I don’t get it. On one hand, the film wants to portray Jackie as unfairly targeted by a lawsuit alleging she slept her way to a major business deal. On the other, the script reduces her to a literal sexual object — not unlike the Orgasmatron from Sleeper. Perhaps the lawsuit is not as “frivolous” as we’re told it is. To quote Nickelback, “she didn’t make it this far just by shaking hands.” Then again, she could have made it as far as she did by being the owner’s daughter. Other than dealing with the lawsuit and amending the company’s anti-fraternization policy, Jackie isn’t shown doing a whole lot of CEOing. The filmmakers deserve credit for one thing: when Jackie is made to choose between her job and her relationship, she chooses both. I’d say she’d be better off choosing her job if I only knew what it entails, but at least the movie assumes a woman can balance her professional and romantic lives. Sadly, this is all just an excuse to normalize sexual misconduct in the workplace. Jackie may eventually find it cute and perhaps a little flattering that Daniel Blanchflower (Brett Goldstein), the company’s in-house attorney, points an erection right at her, and she may be willing to overlook it because Daniel is a good lawyer, but it still sends the wrong message. Walking around a place of business with a stiffy in your pants is another lawsuit waiting to happen. Also, Harvey Weinstein was a hell of a film producer — should we break him out of prison and give him his job back? In the end, Jackie decides to allow interoffice relationships “as long as they are declared.” She makes this decision only after she becomes involved with an employee herself; that is, she only saw something wrong with it until it affected personally. What happens when Jackie and Daniel break up? Will she ban interoffice relationships again? And why do they have to be “declared”? What you’re saying is that employees have a right to a private life as long as they make it public — which they are conveniently very eager to do. The whole point of this development is a scene that plays during the closing credits in which several employees unload the graphic details of their sex lives on the HR guy, even though he makes it clear in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t need or want to hear it. Isn’t that a form of sexual harassment? That a string of further lawsuits right there — good thing Jackie has the “best lawyer in Jersey and the world.”

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