Behind every licentious executive there is a probably a woman or two or three, sitting in the shadows, observing, powerless, and appalled. Australian director Kitty Green’s new film, The Assistant, follows a single day in the work life of Jane (Julia Garner), a neophyte secretary to an entertainment mogul. It’s a dreary workaday job: organizing spreadsheets and schedules, ordering and delivering lunch, emptying wastebaskets, photocopying scripts and headshots that spit out of the copy machine like sausages. This is not Tinseltown but an office located in what looks like the SoHo district of Manhattan, a command center where few words are exchanged between Jane and her male cohorts. The young men chatter on their phones about box office receipts and distribution strategies and take meetings with other anonymous men in suits. All work is in service to a boss whom you barely see (he is credited as actor/director Tony Torn, though the voice is not his). Jane, a former art student and intern, has ambitions “to be a producer.” Why else suffer the tedium of such a job? She’s responsible, organized, tidy, and mostly speaks only when spoken to. She makes sure she enters and exits the elevator after those who are above her—which is everybody. She is deferential to a fault. But on this day her acquiescence is challenged.
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