This ten-minute opening sequence, where we meet Jane – an assistant in a film production company – lays out the basic drudgery of being an assistant in the entertainment industry, and they immediately key us into Jane’s general malaise as she stolidly prepares for her work day.
And, oddly, this opening sequence – for all its precision and Julia Garner’s exhausted, but not bitter, face – feels too general for the specific hollowness that will come in the next eighty minutes of Kitty Green’s excellent “The Assistant”.
And, every subsequent moment in “The Assistant” luxuriates in that sensation of something slightly amiss – a film that presents the insidiousness of the entertainment industry not as a slowly building bombshell, but as a series of inane and exhausting improprieties that ultimately wear you down.
“The Assistant” is not the first movie to grapple with the toxicity of demanding employers or the underbelly of casting couch operations in entertainment industries, but it’s been difficult for many to not read into the way it hews close to what the recent #MeToo movement has reaffirmed about sexual misconduct and predatory behaviour in entertainment industries.
Their lack of authority does not make their careless needling of Jane’s shortcomings any less exhausting and as the film progresses it becomes a pattern of ways that Jane, a recent university graduate, learns to ignore the worse of the world around her.
