Dehumanizing by design, Kitty Green’s debut fiction feature (she has already directed a number of documentaries, mostly on Ukraine) about the punishing workload foisted upon a young female employee of a movie production office in downtown New York doesn’t necessarily feel autobiographical, despite its convincing milieu. Green has extrapolated on the trappings of the #MeToo movement as a means of interrogating post-millennial work culture, and while there is a generic quality to the indignities the titular, unnamed factotum (Julia Garner) has to suffer, the details are so carefully wrought that you sometimes wonder if this couldn’t have been a documentary itself. The big producer boss of the office, undoubtedly based on Harvey Weinstein, is never depicted but his threatening presence hovers over every scene, mostly in the way his bullying demeanor is filtered through the layers of supervision under which the assistant toils. 

The opening scene is the kicker: the assistant is woken up in the wee hours of the morning, picked up by a hired car, and driven to work while it’s still dark and no one has yet arrived at the office. She’s already performed almost a full day’s work before any of her colleagues show up. The explanation for this slavish behavior is revealed as the movie progresses, but any sentient being will understand right away. The young woman has had the great fortune of being hired by this reputable company and will work her way up through the hierarchy into a powerful position in the movie business—or, at least, that’s what she’s led to believe. The indignities are the price she has to pay now, but only months into what is obviously a poorly paid internship she is already beaten down. It’s not just the constant flow of drudge work. It’s the way she’s jerked around by those who need her to cover for them, including the mogul himself, who, while never seen, is definitely heard, especially when the assistant fails to deflect his angry wife, who may have caught on that her husband is sexually abusing aspiring female actors and office staff in the not-so-soundproof privacy of his office. (The assistant, we come to realize, is “not his type.”) That everyone in the office knows this but it’s only the assistant who is charged with actively hiding it is the movie’s emotional lynchpin. The pivotal scene has the assistant visiting the company’s HR chief (Matthew Macfadyen, using the same American accent he sports in Succession but without the smarm), who subtly but effectively informs her that she’ll be washed up in this business if it gets out she’s telling on the boss. 

Green plays it like a thriller, a gambit that undermines some of the movie’s realism but emphasizes its point about the predatory nature of the entertainment world. The assistant herself is not ostensibly a victim of sexual abuse—sexism, yes—but the overall vibe you get from the environment being dramatized is that sexual abuse was (and perhaps still is) considered part of the creative process, a point proven by Harvey Weinstein’s career. 

Opens June 16 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

The Assistant home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 Luminary Productions, LLC