For The Assistant, filmmaker Kitty Green gets beyond the #MeToo headlines to expose a toxic office culture – ABC News

There's a pivotal, and chilling, moment in The Assistant the acclaimed new movie by Australian filmmaker Kitty Green in which Jane (Julia Garner, Ozark), the entry-level underling of a New York studio mogul, visits the company's human resources director, concerned that a young female colleague has become the latest victim of her predatory boss.

With the calm, soothing assurance of a man well practised in performing sympathy, the HR manager (Matthew Macfadyen, Succession) proceeds to quietly undermine Jane's suspicions, and then thoroughly demolish her self-worth gaslighting that mirrors her boss's frequent passive-aggressive emails.

The film is loosely based on the workplace-turned-lair once haunted by the currently incarcerated Harvey Weinstein, the studio baron who became the face of the American film industry's corrupted power structure, and whose downfall served as the catalyst for the #MeToo movement that exploded in late 2017.

Yet the HR scene plays less like a Hollywood-specific confrontation than a distillation of the employee-boss dynamic across any number of workplaces, illustrating the quiet, observational strength of Green's film in which the banality of everyday sexism draws attention to the systems that keep predators in power.

What could have played as an easy narrative celebrating the defeat of a villain instead takes on a more resonant, universal register.

"I feel like it was the accumulation of all these tiny moments, that's kind of what the film is getting at," Green says.

"It's not about this one big thing, it's about all these little deaths by a thousand cuts."

Green, who is based in New York, was preparing a project about consent on college campuses when #MeToo hit the headlines, and decided to make the movement the focus of her next film.

As she poured herself into research interviewing more than 100 women she was amazed at the similarity of the stories she heard.

"I started talking with more and more people, starting with people who were Weinstein Company employees and Miramax employees, and then I broadened out to other production companies and then to studios and agencies, and then to my friends in Melbourne who work in engineering and architecture women from all over the world.

"I was hearing really similar stories and patterns emerging, and that became the basis for the screenplay one day in the life of someone working in an entry-level position," she explains.

The Assistant aligns itself squarely with the perspective of Jane, a 20-something college graduate whose aspirations to be a producer have congealed into a dreary, often-humiliating daily office routine.

In focusing on the mundane nature of the assistant's duties, the film's structural repetition most obviously recalls Chantal Akerman's pioneering Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) a work that Green is quick to cite as a major influence.

The film's dour Tribeca office (actually filmed in an abandoned Times Square space) and Leslie Shatz's immersive sound work suggest a gloomy, labyrinthine world far removed from the glamour of festival yachts and expensive international junkets.

"The film is very quiet and there's not a lot of dialogue, so it's very much about that space, about how claustrophobic and oppressive it feels," Green says.

"[But] I wanted to make sure it didn't feel like a horror film, so it was a tricky tone to get right."

We watch as Jane variously runs errands, answers emails, cleans up after 'casting couch' meetings, and stocks her boss's cabinet with row upon row of erectile dysfunction medication. In one of the film's more upsetting episodes, she's called upon to lie to the boss's aggrieved wife, condemning herself to helpless complicity.

Green's film is full of such moments: during one scene, Jane watches as the photocopier cranks out 8x10 portraits of actresses bound for a date with doom; in another, she gets a nasty paper cut opening a Presidential dinner invitation addressed to her boss neat, effective shorthand for the industry's yawning power disparity.

Meanwhile, those around her, both men and women, treat Jane as insignificant, saddling her with their dirty dishes, squealing kids or discarded coats the latter something that Green says happened to her at a film festival, despite the fact that she was there as a filmmaker.

"That's also how I kind of came about making this film," she explains.

"It started with just a few years on the film festival circuit, where I wasn't being taken as seriously as my male colleagues were. I was getting strange questions from the press about who is in control, who was the mastermind behind my films, which of my male producers was in charge so many strange questions, and things that were undermining my self-confidence."

Although Green had briefly worked as an assistant (at the ABC in Melbourne), ironically it was her experiences as an invited festival guest that inspired her to develop the film.

"If I'm having this much trouble getting any kind of respect, and I'm doing so well, then what's it like for women just trying to get their foot through the door?"

"For me, the question we needed to be looking at is 'Why aren't there more women in positions of power in the industry?' And in order to examine that you need to really examine the culture, and the systems and structures that prevent [the advancement of women]."

In The Assistant, the HR scene serves as a sort of lucid, waking nightmare that momentarily disrupts Jane's dissociative daily routine.

As Green notes, it's a reminder that the HR departments usually exist to protect the company not the employee.

The instinct for self-preservation was echoed in the resistance Green met as she shopped the film around the American studios (ultimately, it would be independently financed and produced).

"The women would always love it. We'd sent it to a development or production executive at a certain company, and the female executives would write back straight away and say that they loved it, and they wanted to work with it, and that they just needed to chat to their boss and that tomorrow they'd get back to us," she recalls.

"The next day we'd get this email saying 'Sorry, my boss won't even read it he knows what the subject matter is and doesn't want to go there'."

Green was also motivated by what she saw as insufficient coverage of #MeToo by the media coverage that centred on a few high-profile cases and convenient monsters.

"I was disappointed that there wasn't more conversation about the systems and structures," she says.

"It seemed everyone was talking about the bad men, the rotten apples, but we weren't addressing concerns that were keeping women out of positions of power.

"I knew that there was something more to explore than what was being covered in the press."

For Green, peeling away the veneer of media coverage has long served as a creative impetus.

"That's one of the reasons I lean toward a certain project," she says.

The Assistant marks the culmination of a series of films in which she has explored the ways female bodies and images are controlled work that began with her documentary on radical group FEMEN, Ukraine Is Not A Brothel (2013), and continued through the slippery docu-fiction of Casting JonBenet (2017), a reexamination of America's obsession with the child beauty queen myth.

It's telling that Green points to Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) a meta-fictional work that infamously dramatised real-life pop tragedy using animated Barbie dolls as the film that made her want to direct, at a young age.

"I got very excited by that like, 'What, this can be cinema?'" she recalls.

Green's unusual approach she studied fiction filmmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts, but gravitated to documentary upon graduation made her early work an odd proposition on the Australian scene, which isn't generally renowned for formal innovation.

"I always made things that were a bit weird and a little offbeat. My short films didn't get into the film festivals as much as everyone else's. So I kind of just kept doing it my own way, and bought my own little DSLR and started shooting my own things around Melbourne," she says.

"Eventually I packed it all up and moved to Ukraine and started shooting there, and that's where it all began, really."

The Assistant applies Green's talent for documentary filmmaking in particular, her ability to observe and to listen to a fictional narrative that might have been melodramatic, even moralistic, in lesser hands.

By eschewing charismatic villains for systemic rot, it reiterates just how entrenched the existing structures are and how much still needs to change, in the wake of #MeToo.

"I feel like it was getting better for a minute. I feel like there were female filmmakers getting opportunities that they weren't getting two years ago," Green says.

"There has been a bit of a shift, but there's still a lot of work to be done. Obviously more conversations need to be had, and that's what the film is supposed to be doing, sparking those conversations."

The Assistant is available from June 10.

Loading...

More here:
For The Assistant, filmmaker Kitty Green gets beyond the #MeToo headlines to expose a toxic office culture - ABC News

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero