s The Assistant starts, dialogue is in short supply.
At dawn, a recently employed young junior
assistant at a film company arrives at work before
her colleagues. Her only company is the hum, buzz
and whir of office equipment, an ambient
soundscape draped around her. Her only friend, it
seems, is a “big hug” mug. In many ways, we soon learn
silence is not always golden.
The question of silence is crucial to The Assistant, the debut
feature from former documentary-maker Kitty Green. It’s
there as Jane (Julia Garner) starts her day. It lingers as she
enquires about colleagues’ weekends and receives little in the
way of reply, let alone a “Thank you” for the unquestioned,
unexamined office duties she is forced to take on. We watch
as she quietly fetches sandwiches, scrubs the couch, prepares
her boss’ medication, stocks the fridge with bottled water,
prints schedules and assumes impromptu childcare duties, all
before looking after a suspiciously young, inexperienced new
female employee and fielding phone calls from her boss’ wife.
A perniciously enforced culture of silence surrounds the
behaviour of her boss, an unnamed and unseen mogul. As
Jane’s suspicions about him grow, we are left in no doubt
what is going on here. But it is the lack of a means by
which she can share her fears that shapes Jane’s story: and
The Assistant is – just as The Invisible Man is Elisabeth Moss’
story – emphatically her story.FINDING FOCUS
For the Australia-born Green, the emphasis on her female
lead over the male aggressor was a decisive one. “I was
reading the coverage of the rise of the #MeToo movement but
I was disappointed that it seemed to focus on these men, the
rotten apples, and the idea that if we get rid of them
everything will be OK. I was trying to make the point that
it’s bigger than that.
“I was more interested,” she explains, “in why more
women aren’t in positions of power at these companies.
Why have they been shut out for so long? In order to
address that we needed to centre women in the narrative as
opposed to what these bad men have been up to, which
I think we’ve heard enough of.”
Though Harvey Weinstein inevitably comes to mind, the
origins of Green’s film predate the initial torrent of
allegations against the former producer in October 2017,
which resulted in a 23-year prison sentence for a first-degree
criminal sex act and third-degree rape. After her
documentaries about a Ukrainian feminist group (Ukraine Is
Not A Brothel, 2013) and the unsolved murder of six-year-old
child beauty pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey (Casting
JonBenét, 2017), Green began to research issues of
consent on college campuses early in 2017,
focusing on theatre troupes who were
“making art about the sexual assault crisis”.
“I was interested in power and gendered
environments,” she explains. “All the issues
that are explored in The Assistant.”
When the Weinstein story broke and
the #MeToo movement began to rise,
Green was inspired to shift focus and
“hone in on” an intimate story that
spoke expansively to corrupt systems of
power. To a degree, she drew on her own
experiences of being a young woman in anSILENTHELL
Right
below
rightJuliaGarner
fightsawallof
silenceasJane
A in The Assistantoffice environment – “not taken seriously, not listened to and
invisible”. As she increased the scope of her interviewees to
interrogate these structures, a constant emerged: “I started
with the film industry but I broadened out to check if women
in finances or tech had similar experiences. Shockingly, these
sort of micro-aggressions are everywhere.”
Through her working day, Jane encounters “micro-
aggressions” in various guises. These include covert bullying
from her colleagues and an encounter in a lift with a character
scripted as ‘Famous Actor’ (Patrick Wilson), who takes up an
unsettling amount of space. Another knuckle-gnawing scene
centres on Jane’s appeal to her HR manager, Wilcock
(Matthew Macfadyen), whose response highlights the ways
in which unexamined routines and rigorously maintained
hierarchies suppress voices and enforce compliance, either
through outright threats or the dangled carrot of success.
Rigorously, Green anatomises the kind of climate in which
misconduct can become normalised, insulating abusers from
repercussions. “The culture of silence was something I was
interested in,” says Green. “The banality of evil, you know?I WAS DISAPPOINTED THAT IT SEEMED TO FOCUS ON
THESE MEN, THE ROTTEN APPLES , AND THE IDEA THAT
IF WE GET RID OF THEM EVERYTHING WILL BE OK
KITTY GREEN
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