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
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