助理

正规大学毕业，做的是招聘职位结果刚进公司就要给老板端茶倒水——是我

上级要雇佣一个漂亮却毫无经验的女孩子，让她在公司等到晚上八点才面试，觉得这个做法不专业所以没有配合，被他大骂一顿——是我

开会的时候被领导“提点”，以下是他的原话：“你以为你长得漂亮吗？你不就是有点气质我才让你进公司吗？” —— 是我

公司很正规，规模很大，工资不低，刚出校园没敢辞职只能继续忍着——是我

做招聘的我也知道，短期换工作是大忌，特别是在有声望的公司做不到两个月就辞职，你很难跟新的雇主解释，甚至也不会给你机会解释。

所以针对一切“她辞职不就好了”的言论，我只想说…… 即使你的资金足够支撑你辞职，但你怎么知道下一个公司就没有性骚扰呢？

被歧视的社会环境下，女人要保住工作才能不被逼嫁人，要保住工作才能交得起房租、房贷，不靠家里不靠男人不靠色相，一切都很难。更难的是，家里、男人、老板都在向你伸出“橄榄枝”，说要养你，说你的存在就是一个附属品，说你的倔强只会伤害你自己。

“只要你听话我们就养你”，不知道有多少姐妹在这些糖衣炮弹的袭击下惨烈牺牲。她们的现在是幸福的。

我躲避了甜蜜的枪林弹雨，先是压抑的端茶倒水、迎合上级；后来加班加点，带团队。一个以事业为主的女人，要自己省吃俭用花钱买房子的女人，在世人眼里是不幸的。

但有了经济能力后的我，必然会是最幸福的。

攒够Fuck you money。

匆匆看了下短评，大家原来对这部片子真正主题理解有这么大的偏差。这片子的标签是Harvey Weinstein movie，它讲的不是简单的打工人打工魂，社畜，职场小白什么的，而是Harvey Weinstein性侵案的一个十分独特的视角。它聚焦于他的私人助理，但这个助理又并不是他的type，而且聚焦于一天的时间（entry-level的职员难以置信的漫长的一天），而这一天正是助理拼凑起了Weinstein性侵证据的一天。从这个角度来看，这部电影必须联系所反映的真实案件，不然对它的理解会完全浅表或者偏差。

从摄影方面来讲，整体的色调非常冰冷，后思极恐，大量的脸部特写和俯拍镜头突出了主角的孤立感和无助感。在声音处理上，主角的声音也是微弱的近乎被淹没。

本片的高潮无疑是Jane和HR的对话，从体谅到压制到批评，观众也不得不考虑到底Jane应该如何抉择，或者说她到底有没有选择。那个遥不可及的制作人梦想值不值得一次次卑微的道歉邮件和一次次良心的谴责。

看的时候在想，如果Jane和两个男助理去吃个晚饭会不会好些呢？她会得到一些support？还是会觉得大家都知道却心照不宣而更加幻灭呢？答案似乎是后者。

仍然是关于“哈维·韦恩斯坦事件”的一部电影。但不同于之前的影片，这一部是从他的助理的一天的角度记录了一些不一样的事情。

电影就是真实的记录了一个助理的一整天：天不亮上班，打杂兼职整理卫生清洗盘子，无休止的电话，老板的发疯以及书面道歉，安抚老板妻子带孩子…一个半小时的电影让人觉得这一天怎么这么长啊…而最窒息的就是投诉的部分：当女主认为可能有女生遭到侵害时暗示的言语，投诉部门的故意曲解和老板的要挟，简直把工作最令人窒息的部分完全展现了！

高学历，有经验，从众多竞争者中脱颖而出之后呢？被困在小办公室里，早出晚归，似乎永远实现不了的制片梦，每天停不下来的重复和道歉，社会责任感被无情抹杀，用工作威胁你闭嘴…而这样看似体面的工作真的是人在追求的吗？

整个电影的颜色有点莫兰迪的感觉，淡淡的，灰色的，压抑的。时长不长的电影却看的人有点难受有点烦躁…不能说很喜欢，但视角和审美还是可以接受的，社畜看完更抑郁了……

日常的社畜生活，冷峻，窒息，无法逃脱…看的实在是压抑了…

侧面记录Me too的性侵大佬，混蛋渣渣，办公室的公司的其他人也是睁一只眼闭一只眼。遇到棘手的老板老婆的催命电话，其他男同事就是扔给女主，就像跟她打招呼的方式就是扔废纸团一样。对待投诉的主管，明明知道老板的种种罪行，却还是袒护，并以威胁女主，终了还不忘打击下女主不是老板的菜…

重压之下，大家都是负能量下的傀儡，麻木的执行，扼杀自己的独立人格。

Two 2019 feature debuts from aspiring filmmakers that hold fast our zeitgeist by putting a female character in the dead center. Kitty Green’s THE ASSISTANT is exclusively lensed from our titular heroine’s perspective to cast a startling light on a salient social issue in the wake of the notorious Weinstein effect; meanwhile, Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ SWALLOW, doggedly builds up a reductive dissection of a young, gravid bride’s eerie disintegration, by dint of uncomfortable body horror tropes to reify her pica affliction.

Adhering to her technique developed as a documentarian, Green adopts an uncharacteristic angle to tackle her unsavory subject matter. In THE ASSISTANT, Garner plays Jane, a junior assistant in an unspecified NYC film production company, and the film takes place during her overlong working hours on a hectic Monday. We watch her being picked up by a limousine to work long before daybreak, and follow her in clerical drudgery, see the big shots from her peripheral vision and hear things only within her earshot. By doing that, Green risks narrative clarity and leaves the scandalous skinny in connotation or off-screen, consequently the film rather invites an immediate revisit to suss the implications of every casual dialogue and throwaway joke, and for better to piece together what is going on.

Green’s strategy, not audience-friendly, but totally chimes in with Jane’s grunt-level existence in the company, but felicitously, do we really need to see those sordid goings-on with our own eyes? We shall all be thankful to Green for being so considerate in her approach, because such a canker, condoned systemically by the industry and beyond is better limned as this immaterial, omnipresent force of vileness, penetrating every couch and behind every closed doors in every office and hotel room, it is everywhere therefore it must be put paid to.

Carrying the entire film on her slender shoulders, Garner exhibits strenuous stamina and restrained body language as the doormat (Jane is a sponge absorbent of the negative outpourings of the boss’ wife) and the dogsbody (she is virtually invisible in front of her superiors and other colleagues), even the two male assistants callously exploit her newness (only being there for 5 weeks), or maybe also because she is a she, and let her bear the brunt of blame and verbal abuse. Yet, in her position, she has no right to say otherwise.

Jane aspires to be a producer, and she knows all too well that she must pay her dues and turn a blind eye on the seedy matters, if she wants to make it. But on the off chance when that actually happens, she will have already become one of the silent connivers in that toxic working environment (implied by the unseen boss’s sinister motivation). Moreover, she should considered herself lucky, according to the head of Human Resources (Macfadyen), simply because “you are not his type”, it’s all so reassuring! Macfadyen has that peculiar air of faux-earnestness, mixed with veiled hubris, to express the warped normalcy as if it is the most commonplace words to utter, whereas Garner is so utterly disconcerted and anguished in her botched worm-will-turn rebel, their exchange is the crescendo of this gritty film.

Incredibly, THE ASSISTANT plays up the working place’s drabness, impersonality and functional symmetry to keep us absorbed with its coded message. However, SWALLOW is so stunning on the eye level, the young couple, Hunter and Richie Conrad (Bennett and Stowell) are gorgeous, their affluent, minimalistic upstate NYC residence with a killer view, is often filtered through prismatic hues to emphasize the magic power of money.

But what happens inside is far less majestic, Hunter, hailed from a lower class, is maladaptive to her new ascendancy as the cinderella, who has a bun in the oven and develops an anomalous appetite for inedible things (including some small sharp objects, those swallow scenes are fastidiously arranged, and not for the squeamish). Does she subconsciously want to lose the baby? and why is that? A thought never occurs to our prince charm Richie, instead, his family hires a burly minder Luay (Nakli), a Syrian immigrant, to keep an eye on her minute by minute to forestall any self-inflict harm, solely for the safety of their precious progeny.

If the plot is piled up with unmitigated clichés (cruel, senseless rich people, good-hearted immigrants, a fable of perfect family of origin, the psychological manipulation of negging and nonpology, the list goes on and on…) and Mirabella-Davis might be a lousy fabulist, what gives vitality to SWALLOW, besides Katelin Arizmendi’s stylish cinematography, is Bennett’s metamorphic performance. A frail flower distressed by her parentage (the cat will be let out of the bag later) and conjugal negligence, Bennett, who looks like a poor girl’s Jennifer Lawrence, grandly inhabits Hunter’s compulsion, disorientation and exasperation with such astonishing finesses, one cannot take eyes off her. Even when we cannot relate to Hunter’s weird condition, we are compulsively intrigued by Bennett’s nuanced delivery and delicate mannerism, hoping some deus ex machina can materialize to save her.

Eventually, Mirabella-Davis grants Hunter a touching closure (Denis O’Hare’s brilliant cameo is exactly what the doctor ordered, he can proficiently pull off a complicated emotional range in meager minutes, though on paper, the reconciliation is still a mawkish cliché) and the final shot statically looking at a lady’s room with people come and go writ large the film's emboldened stance: pro-life and pro-woman.

When all is said and done, both THE ASSISTANT and SWALLOW are promising works well wrought by their emergent creators, together, they paint a vivid picture of the wrongs (in the working place or in one’s own home) inflicted upon women by faulty, haughty, selfish men, but they are not just reproachful to the stronger sex, their artistry underlies more hope in women’s resilience, Jane might walk the plank the next day, she can at least have peace with herself and knows better of her goals, as for Hunter, starts anew and puts aside a failed marriage, together with her psychogenic malady, scrumptious comestibles are beckoning and cinderella can get stuffed!

referential entries: Darren Aronofsky’s MOTHER! (2017, 6.6/10); Cory Finley’s THOROUGHBRED (2017, 6.5/10); Leigh Whannell’s THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020, 6.9/10).

Title: The Assistant

Year: 2019

Country: USA

Language: English, Mandarin

Genre: Drama

Director/Screenwriter: Kitty Green

Music: Tamar-kali

Cinematography: Michael Latham

Editing: Kitty Green, Blair McClendon

Cast:

Julia Garner

Matthew Macfadyen

Noah Robbins

Jon Orsini

Kristine Froseth

Dagmara Dominczyk

Alexander Chaplin

Purva Bedi

Juliana Canfield

Makenzie Leigh

Patrick Wilson

Rating: 7.4/10

Title: Swallow

Year: 2019

Country: USA, France

Language: English, Arabic

Genre: Drama, Mystery

Director/Screenwriter: Carlo Mirabella-Davis

Music: Nathan Halpern

Cinematography: Katelin Arizmendi

Editing: Joe Murphy

Cast:

Haley Bennett

Austin Stowell

Elizabeth Marvel

David Rasche

Denis O’Hare

Luna Lauren Velez

Laith Nakli

Babak Tafti

Zabryna Guevara

Rating: 6.9/10

比较真实的一部电影。女主角秀丽文雅，聪明能干，在大公司工作，毕业于出色的大学，且GPA非常高，父母温柔理解。从这样的背景看，她或许也应当出身于社会的中等阶层。她在任何人眼里都应当是“社会精英”一样的存在，并被期待拥有光明的未来。可是现实却是她在办公室里做“最低微”的工作，不断打杂：取快递，做奶昔，接电话，打印文件，清扫垃圾。琐碎的工作一眼看不到头，进进出出的同事当她是空气，老板任用她也仅仅因为她肯干但认为理所应当，做对事的时候当她不存在，做错事或心情不好就会骂她撒气——这一切与人们所想象的“精英”、“体面”相去甚远。可是她所能做的只是“能忍则忍”，因为整个公司体制都在为老板的利益服务，没有人会care她，且她是可有可无的，毕竟有400个常青藤学生正在竞争这个职位——虽然新来的没有任何经验的女同事靠着姿色就很快上位了。而更残酷的是，她可能永远也实现不了自己想当制片人的梦想。当然，女主幸运在同事和前辈似乎还比较照顾和支持她。 整部电影仅仅是展现了助理的一天，除了“投诉被拦下”的小高潮以外，基本没有任何剧情设计，凸现出无聊和无意义感，恰如她的每一天。这个世界上大多数工作都是重复性的，这部电影关注了普罗大众的生活，更是男性包围下女性工作人员的生活（看办公室男女比例即知），虽然没有任何精神上的所谓“升华”，但只是展现，就是一种“看见”。而被展现和“看见”，则有利于问题的解决和当中人们的“自我和解”。因此五星。

电影最后留了个“微光”，主角的父亲说：“工作刚开始都会有些压力大的。”以后会更好吗？或许会的。