Review of 'The Assistant'

This was positioned as inspired by the "MeToo" movement, but it's not what you'd call inspiring. It depicts the working life of a young woman who is the assistant to a senior manager in what is probably a film company - it's not completely clear. Not much in the film is clear - it's very understated, and much of the dialogue is mumbled. It also manages to be tense all the time while still being boring. A few things happen in the film, but everything, every glance and gesture, seems to be invested with significance that does actually go anywhere. The film was less than 90 minutes but felt much longer.

The young woman has to clean up in the boss's office before the cleaners arrive, and we see her picking up a small item of jewellery. But there's not much sign that the boss is an exploitative lecher - we never see the boss at all, just the minions. The young woman has to book hotel rooms for other young women who arrive for vaguely defined jobs, and knows that the boss has gone to the hotel too - she has to cover for him to his wife by saying he's in a meeting.

The description of the film says that the young woman is eventually pushed to make a stand, but she doesn't really. She plucks up the courage to go and speak to someone internal (an HR person? a legal person?) and he belittles what she says and tells her that it's in her best interest to forget it - and she backs down. More or less tearfully she agrees to withdraw what wasn't even a complaint yet, and in the next scene we see that the internal person must have notified the boss, because he calls her up with a lot of swearing. But he seems to get over it pretty quickly - I can't help thinking that in real life that would be it for her, and she'd be sacked.

Much of the film is just about the misery of entry-level corporate life, and though there's always the atmosphere of sexual predation in the background, quite a lot of the misery would apply in its absence, and to male entry-level people too. Having spent some of my working life in corporate environments where there are people who are powerful (usually but not always men) and abuse that power in trivial ways, I can empathise with the feeling of having to eat a little bit of shit every day of your working life. In my experience these people were also bending or breaking the rules - particularly about abuse of expenses - and everyone knew and no-one would do anything about it. That, and the knowledge that you must remain squeaky clean all the time because you wouldn't get away with anything, reinforces that really depressing feeling of being at the bottom of the heap.

Other friends (I'm particularly thinking of Italians) have told me that it was entirely normal for young joiners to an organisation to be expected to make the coffees and work the photocopier for their more established colleagues, and this could go on for years until a new junior joined.

So sexual predators are shit, and no-one should have to endure them, but work can be pretty shit even without them.