Name that film 70s/80s futuristic office working

Question

I watched a film one very late night years ago which I really enjoyed but never actually knew what the name of it was. I spend 20-30 minutes now and again every few months searching online for sci-fi films trying to find it but I've never been able to track it down.

It looks like it was made in the 70s or 80s but is set in the future. One scene which I remember vividly is the protagonist starting a new job and trying to talk to the boss while walking down a corridor but the boss is also talking to lots of other employees, making decisions, signing documents etc.

After that scene, the protagonist goes to start work in his cubicle/office and after sitting down his desk is pulled through the wall and gets shorter. He pulls it back out and it is pulled back in again, where he and the viewer realise it is a desk being shared with the employee in the office next to him and they begin having a battle for desk space by both pulling it away from each other through the wall.

Sorry this isn't much to go on but I only have a very vague memory of other scenes from the film. I hope somebody out there has seen it and can name it for me?

Answer 1

This is definitely Brazil, released in 1985. Directed by Terry Gilliam, it is a SF/F satire on beaurocracy.

Wikipedia describes it:

The film centres on Sam Lowry, a man trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams while he is working in a mind-numbing job and living a life in a small apartment, set in a consumer-driven dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines. Brazil's bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the government depicted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, except that it has a buffoonish, slapstick quality and lacks a Big Brother figure.

Here is the desk scene you remember.

And here is the hallway scene you remember.