助理

9月在特柳赖德电影节最初上映，1月将在北美上映。本片基本上就是与《爆炸新闻》（Bombshell）一样，是一部米兔运动后诞生的电影，旨在讲述以前从未被曝光、但早应该被曝光的娱乐业内幕。只是它的风格与角度都与《Bombshell》大不同。低调、格局小，没大明星，甚至没有提到主要针对的人物名字，主角也不是直接受害者，而是从一个旁观者的角度去观察整个事件和这个有毒的环境，却很有效地展示出了为何这类办公室性侵或权利压榨可以风行多年却不为人知。

在2017年我们看到了关于韦恩斯坦的报道时，受害者的描述中常常提到被他的助理带到酒店，或有时有助理安排约见，甚至有助理在场。在读Ronan Farrow 关于韦恩斯坦的书籍《 Catch and Kill》时也会多次读到他的助理。在《Bombshell》中，也会看到福斯老板Roger Ailes也有一个助理，帮忙给他带姑娘去办公室，并关门。。。你会不会纳闷，这些助理应该都知道老板的勾当，但为何她们不讲出来，为何她们不辞职而是选择配合？她们本身是否也被。。。?

1月31日将上映的这部《助理》就是从这个角度首次把韦恩斯坦周围的人搬上银幕，那些就在他办公室门外工作的人都是些什么人，每天都做什么，又怎么看待他的行为，都在本片中一一呈现。

然而影片没有出现韦恩斯坦这个人，也没有提到，每个助理接起电话，都是说this is..还没说出是谁的办公室就被对方打断。但影片没开始多久，观众一下就可以看出这个办公室的领导是谁。不仅因为各位助理对白中透露的电影相关内容，也包括他的所作所为在新闻中被披露过，就连到洛杉矶给女明星安排去的酒店The Peninsula Beverly Hills也在片中提到，他经常勾引女明星去酒店的戛纳电影节也在片中有体现。一个场景中，甚至他在见一个女明星时，搭讪的话就是：“你去过法国吗？” 当然，我们每次都是只听到声音，但门就关上了。。。

影片的核心是一个新来的女助理，她毕业于高校，有着很强的野心，希望能成为制片人，她的父母也为她有这份工作自豪。影片不紧不慢地呈现了女助理一天的工作，从凌晨离家到夜晚回家，虽然琐碎，但却真实地反应出了底层助理的辛苦和整个大环境的潜规则。然而她每天起早贪黑，甚至兼做清洁工作，办公室里却没有一个人尊重和感激她的付出，几乎没有一个人正眼看她。影片也首次展示了一个好莱坞公司初级助理工作的辛苦。

这其实不是新闻，在很多年前，就有过相关的书籍，专门讲好莱坞助理生存指南！大部分的助理无论男女刚开始都非常低微，做的大部分工作与制片完全无关，就是复印、接电话、端茶倒水、帮老板买午餐、订机票、报销、拿干洗的衣服。。。这些我做实习的时候也做过的。只不过，既然很多大导演、大制片也是这样起步的，很多年轻人也都任劳任怨。

本片中的女助理做这些倒没有怨言，只是她慢慢发现，不断有年轻漂亮的女孩进出办公室或被安排去酒店，她还要帮忙应付老板的老婆发来的质问。甚至公司上下都知道老板的行为，不仅没抱怨，反而跟着一起调侃那些女孩，对此习以为常，甚至不少会帮他安排女孩，打点一切。

因为女孩也是新去作助理，就像观众一样，对一切不熟悉也充满好奇，带着观众一起逐渐打开了潘多拉的盒子，里面的乌烟瘴气地让她多次窒息。但如果去找HR，就是被威胁，大好前途可能尽毁。临走还要被HR说：“别担心，你不是他的菜。”作为安慰。

最有趣的是，韦恩斯坦每次批评她后，她都需要写书面信道歉。而韦恩斯坦也会夸她是聪明人。仿佛好色的老板也有理智的时候，美女虽然多，但总要找一个是真的干活儿的，而且还要识大体顾大局。而这个有着优秀学业背景且急于成功、从小城市来纽约的女孩正好符合要求。

本片是米兔运动后，编导采访了多位韦恩斯坦助理写成的。我个人觉得大部分的内容都是真实可信的，大大满足了观众对韦恩斯坦的好奇心。毕竟，直接从受害者角度出发，往往被认为偏颇，不如从他最亲近的旁人角度出发，更加客观。而女助理虽然一切看在眼中，却只能沉默，片中大量的时间都是没有对白的，只有复印机的声音，电话铃声，正是显示了为何我们等了这么久才听到事情真相的原因：无数这样追求事业的小人物作为个体，都因理想而放弃了原则，不得不向权势低头。。。直到一个又一个人挺身而出。

影片成功地渲染了一种恐怖气氛，整个电影的颜色灰暗，死气沉沉，在沉默之外的对白中则多为对人的侮辱和贬低，成功营造了一个有毒环境，似乎没有一个好人。片中也常常可以听到韦恩斯坦对下属的大喊大叫及用难听的话贬低下属，这种口头上的暴力也是他的标志性特色之一。虽然没有任何暴力内容，但女助理显然被周围的环境搞得惶恐，经常看到她吞口水，不敢看周围的人。

看完本片，大家定会觉得安海瑟薇在当年的《穿Prada的女魔头》里出演的女助理那简直是太幸福了。

不过，本片的呈现方式在大众眼中可能会偶尔无聊，缺乏商业吸引力，毕竟看着她打扫房间、洗盘子和复印很久确实会觉得没有《Bombshell》那种快节奏、戏剧性的叙事方式有趣，所以才退出颁奖季而在1月上映。但影片里讲述的一切真的不容错过。话说就算找大明星，像《Bombshell》那样拍都依然可能备受争议，这类性侵电影目前其实很艰难，但又很重要。 主要原因是事情才发生不久，但相信未来类似的电影会越来越多，也希望角度不同，可以有更为犀利和尖锐的视角。

《助理》的预告，其实有些误导别人了，从预告来看似乎是一个惊悚片，但是本片看下来，倒是颇有“去戏剧化”的特点，哪怕全片中最为激烈的冲突，也不过是简和HR的一段对话而已，不过尽管剧情是如此平缓地流动，我们依旧能在一个个镜头的延伸之中和女主感同身受，并在那些重要的剧情节点上体味影片所蕴含的复杂情绪，可谓“于无声处听惊雷”。

我还是很喜欢这部电影的，它做得比我预期得要好，没有如我所想那样只成为一张控诉韦恩斯坦的大字报，电影展现了女性在职场中所受到的无形压迫以及迫不得已的沉默。 所以，这样的电影绝对有必要拍出来，更有必要被世人看到，很多人已经在平日的生活中习惯了缄口不言，习惯了沉默并接受那些正在发生的不公允，那么如若连电影都不能为这些人发声的话，她们内心的控诉又能向何处宣泄呢？

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……

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

在六一儿童节这天看完这部片。 说句实话，一开始看这片，我觉得完全就是在刻画着职场底层社畜的工作日常。女主是一名助理，每天重复着枯燥无味繁琐无聊的工作，打印老板的日程表打印公司资料、点外卖拿外卖、接待来客、清洁办公室卫生、拿快递拆快递。在这样的工作状态下忙到忘了家人的生日。 后来查了资料发现这部片是根据电影公司的大boss韦恩斯坦性侵娱乐圈多名女性的新闻而进行改编的。又觉得这片有点内味~ 影片没有像根据真实事件改编的那样去复制事件。 而是通过女主作为那位邪恶大boss的助理，在知道上司的所作所为后，为避免更多新人遭受伤害而所做的挣扎来完成整部电影的制作的。全片台词很少，大多数镜头都是日常女主的工作行为。灰色的色调+大量女主枯燥工作的镜头+极少的台词，给了全片一种极度压抑的情感基调。 甚至我觉得影片所表现出来的抑郁成分要高于公司高层性侵下属这个主题表达的成分。后者其实在影片中一直以一些侧面的信息来表达，可能不了解影片社会背景的还会get不到。 比如，公司新招的一个女助理，一来就安排去住在酒店。

再比如，女主去向hr部门述说，却被hr怼回去——“你不是他的菜”

影片在隐晦地透漏出公司上上下下都知道大boss的恶行，就是没人敢言。

另一方面，女主的工作何尝不是现在社会上职场社畜的现状，工作内容重复性高且枯燥，对自己的发展没有丝毫帮助，同时还要忍受着同事的欺压，工作上处处谨慎小心，生怕哪里犯了错，全天候神经紧绷，被上级骂完还得小心翼翼地回复信息道歉和表忠心。 全片看完下来还是很让人很难受的，是那种平静的难受，是那种你所处周遭的高压环境压得你快没法喘息又给你留有一丝空间挣扎，给你希望又不会让你触碰到希望。 愿普天之下的社畜终有扬眉吐气之日， 愿职场无pua。

Panorama 工作中种种困局过于真实，现实中即使老板不是Weinstein这种人渣，也能感受到仿佛被四面墙死死压住的恐惧，因为职场对女性的压迫有比性侵更为隐蔽和恶劣的形式。女主角无力感的呈现非常到位。写实的现实职场环境，从始至终未见上司，却不断从准备餐点、打扫、耳环诸多侧面细节中勾勒了老板霸道模样，而仅有水平和垂直的镜头代表了办公室内人情的冰冷尖锐，一面是男性主导的傲慢潜意识的大环境，另一面也是助理这一类人缺少支持者不敢发声的困境；因此，如今MeToo的意义所在便是如此