Films like this have the capacity to sneak up on you if you’re not careful. Ostensibly, nothing really happens in it, at least by the metric most films are measured by. It covers a single work shift of Jane, an assistant at a film studio. Over the course of its 80-minute-and-change running time, we see her do menial office work like getting coffees and fixing the printer, and there’s no substantial character change that takes place; this isn’t the kind of movie that ends with a big rousing moment for our heroine when she decides to pursue a better career or hooks up with her dream guy or anything like that. But within that framing, and anchored by Julia Garner’s performance as Jane, this film is fucking terrifying.
The feature debut of Aussie documentarian Kitty Green shows her tapping into those same fly-on-the-wall instincts in depicting Jane’s work environment. It’s all shown with a distinct matter-of-factness that makes it feel like we’re actually watching someone at just another day in the office. And as someone who, up until the COVID lockdown screwed up the employment system, actually worked at an office job, I felt many a pang of familiarity at how mundane this all is.
That itself could prove a deal breaker for some audiences, as this is an especially understated and unassuming feature. But it’s in that quiet subtlety that it makes its loudest points; it’s basically a production defined by the term ‘deafening silence’. As we follow Jane over this singular workday, a lot of little things start to pile up. A glib remark from a co-worker here, a minor showing of disregard there, a thankless task assigned to her over there; the sort of behaviour that doesn’t say that much on its own, but speaks volumes when it’s all stacked together as ‘normal’ behaviour.
This is a real case of showing, not telling, as a lot of the worser implications within the story are just that: Implications. We’re never told outright that Jane is treated so much like a work horse that she’s expected to sort out another employee’s marital problems over the phone. We’re never told outright that the promise of Hollywood glitz and glamour that makes workers, women in particular, stick it out in these conditions isn’t as lavish as it seems. And we’re never told outright that Jane’s boss, the head of this film production company, does more things to women than merely hiring them. But in the space between the lines, that is still what is heard.
All of this eventually comes to a head (well, as much of a head as something with this slow a burn can have) when Jane discusses some of the… issues that she’s noticed with the HR department, embodied in infuriatingly bleak fashion by Matthew Macfadyen. In the space of a single scene, all that unspoken ‘boy’s club’ culture and glibness and casual disregard pokes its head out just long enough to make things as crystal clear as possible: The odds are heavily stacked against those like Jane. The women in the film industry who want to contribute to that industry and the art form it props up, who most likely notice all those little things that don’t add up, but who get told that it’s an all-or-nothing scenario. They either accept this shit as the way things are… or they’re out.
This is what people are talking about when they bring up ‘rape culture’ and ‘microaggressions’, as it’s not the biggest extremes of mistreatment that engender this kind of attitude. Instead, it’s all the smaller things; the stuff that appears so minor, yet so frequent, that they become ignorable background noise. But no matter how small it all seems, after a while, it starts to pile up. And by the time you realise just how big that pile is, you’re already choking on it.
It’s not so much drama as it is casual social horror, right down to how the film’s rather ambiguous ending makes what we just saw that much more depressing. The notion that not only is this considered ‘normal’ for working women in this industry, but that single work shift we just flinched our way through? Imagine that every day, every week, for the rest of your working life. This is a film where the almost-suffocating adherence to realism turns out to be the perfect approach for the story, as the only thing more unsettling than the drip feed of mistreatment we’re shown is the thought of how many women are going through this exact shit, in real-time, as I’m typing this sentence.
No comments:
Post a Comment