Judges’ Comments: The very, very close first runner-up was Kitty Green’s recent The Assistant, a claustrophobic drama set in a film production office. This, we all agreed, was ‘an impressive review that flows easily between critiquing the film itself and a dialogue about the world it exposes. There is an intelligent analyst at work here.’ Above all, a remarkably timely film in the MeToo climate, the reviewer rightly noted, along with its skilful use of ambient sound to create extra tension.
The Assistant (dir. Kitty Green, 2019): reviewed by Catherine O’Sullivan
Midway through The Assistant , the new film by Kitty Green, a young female assistant waits by the office printer as it ejects glossy headshot after glossy headshot. A stack of actresses’ faces piles up. Before leaving the headshots on her boss’s desk, the assistant picks up one of them and studies it. It isn’t clear what she’s thinking. Without voiceover or explanatory dialogue, it is not until later that we can reevaluate this moment as a quietly pivotal one. It’s one in a series of scenes that shift the burden of noticing and deciphering onto the audience, a clever strategy in this deafeningly quiet film, one of the first to directly address the legacy of #MeToo.
Green effectively contrasts the enormity of this issue with the constrained scope of her narrative,following one woman over the course of one day. Jane (Julia Garner) arrives at work so early that it feels clandestine, but it’s just a routine start in her role as an assistant to a high-ranking movie executive. Jane’s daily tasks span the mundane to the inappropriate, yet Garner performs them all with the same resigned blankness. The film uses almost entirely diegetic sound, a decision that simultaneously captures the strip-lit inanity of an office job while also allowing the audience to tune into the low throb of unease that underpins every scene: the angry thrum of voices murmuring through doors, phone conversations half-heard and even less understood. The film is unrelenting in its close alignment with Jane, the camera clinging to her in a claustrophobic grip as she mutely goes about her job. Anchored in this tight perspective, we see what Jane sees, begin to suspect what she has probably suspected for a while: that her boss is abusing his power and that the young women who filter into his office may not be safe.
Shortly after depositing the headshots on her boss’s desk, Jane leaves the office for an impromptu meeting with the company’s HR manager. Without underlining the causal link between the moment Jane studied the photo and her decision to finally speak up, the film manages to suggest that something has shifted internally for her. Empathy and action spring out of observation.
The interaction with the HR manager (Matthew MacFayden) is the longest stretch of unbroken dialogue in the film and is therefore the most explicit about power, complicity and abuse. As Jane speaks, he takes occasional notes on a yellow legal pad. We can imagine what he’s writing: isolated phrases, scraps that could amount to something or nothing, depending on your perspective. For the HR man, Jane’s hesitations bleach any credence from the small details she’s seized on. An earring found on the floor of an office could be evidence of something untoward, or it could just mean that the janitorial crew aren’t doing their jobs.
Many reviewers of the film have noted The Assistant ’s debt to Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. Green herself has talked about the profound influence watching Jeanne Dielman… had on her as an aspiring filmmaker, noting especially that cinematic emphasis on the rhythm of a working day. Both films make visible the invisibility of women’s work, whether that’s peeling potatoes for dinner or scrubbing a suspect stain off your boss’s couch. Equally, both films are examples of feminist collaboration between director and actor: in the case of The Assistant , Green and Garner worked together before shooting to interview real life film industry assistants. Delphine Seyrig took the title role in Akerman’s film as part of a personal project to reinvent her own image as an actress, a self-imposed atonement for the type of idealised feminine she had played in her early career and later regretted. In 1981, Seyrig directed her own film, Sois Belle et Tais-toi , a collection of interviews with actresses about their experiences with sexual harassment. Seyrig’s film opens with a succession of photographs of these actresses. Unlike the stack of anonymous headshots that fillips Jane into action, these women are named and allowed to tell their own stories.
Sois Belle et Tais-Toi is an important, if underseen, film and Green, previously a documentarian, could have chosen to make something similar for the post-Weinstein era. Instead, a subtly different impulse is at work in The Assistant . By choosing to work within a fictional construct, Green gives herself the space to let ambiguities fester. It’s a brave choice that runs the risk of frustrating audiences. At no point does a woman clearly voice what has happened to her. Jane’s attempt to expose injustices is a failure. Without a clear accusation there cannot be a reckoning. Instead, The Assistant acknowledges silence and suspicions, unvoiced concerns, lived experiences that can’t or won’t be heard. That is why the labelling of it as the first #MeToo film, or as being somehow ‘about’ Weinstein, is reductive. It is a film about abuse in the film industry that is not about individual perpetrators and victims, but rather the structures that allow such abuse to proliferate. It asks us, how do you function within these structures? How do you interpret what you see? What are the limits of empathy?
Films, even where they are about working life, always elide the labour that have gone into their production. In the case of The Assistant , the accolades it has received have mostly focused on Green’s direction and the excellent work done by Garner, who carries the film in an un-showy, deceptively physical performance. Yet the film reminds us of the behemoth industry that lurks behind even the most well-intentioned projects, the myriad decisions and compromises that allow films to be made. It is often uncomfortable viewing, both for its subject matter and for the austere restraint it imposes on itself. The Assistant is a subtly tough piece of film-making that should be seen for the grim, rich detail of its fabricated world, as well as for the ways it might alter how we perceive our own.