Secretary

Secretary (2002) opens with a woman just out of hospital, who harms herself, taking a job as a secretary at a law office. Her employer punishes her typing errors, and an arrangement develops between them that quickly stops being a working relationship. The film does not treat this as scandal but as two people finding their match. The source is Mary Gaitskill's short story of the same name from her 1988 collection Bad Behavior. Erin Cressida Wilson expanded it and the ending was changed. Steven Shainberg has said the change was deliberate: he took his cue from My Beautiful Laundrette normalising a gay relationship in the eighties and wanted the same for this one. It is Maggie Gyllenhaal's first major role, opposite James Spader. Shainberg spent two years planning the office design with production designer Amy Danger. The film cost four million dollars, made 9.3 million worldwide, and won the Special Jury Prize for Originality at Sundance. It runs 111 minutes. Good for: unconventional love stories, films that decline to judge, and Gyllenhaal and Spader. Less good for: the self harm is shown explicitly. The most serious criticism is that it romanticises a relationship that develops without explicit consent and is open to abuse. That criticism is fair, and the film does not answer it.