BDSM WEEK: GETTING BOSSED AROUND

Returning to Secretary more than a decade after it was new, my first reaction has nothing to do with its content or story, but is one of rampant nostalgia: remember when we had indie movies like this? Because I had, in all honesty, kind of forgotten. Such a marvelous age, the late 1990s and early 2000s, when there were films made with the acerbic humor and in-your-face depictions and muted but absolutely distinctive style that director Steven Shainberg and his team played around with here. Secretary is a film told as much by where its camera is placed and what objects we see within it as by the explicit events of Erin Cressida Wilson's screenplay, which are anyway not very explicit - it is a film that shows a lot and tells much less, leaving us to piece together character motivations and interiority through implicit details. It's a film that assumes a fully engaged, adult audience, basically, and it came from a long-ago period when a Sundance-pedigreed movie could unthinkingly expect to have that audience show up. 13 whole years! Anyway, it leaves Secretary feeling awfully smart and engaging in ways that I, for one, had long since forgotten to hope for when wading through the realm of quirky little slice-of-life dramas made outside the studio system.

Secretary opens with a beat that immediately establishes the gravely dry tone of its comedy going forward, and gives us a big fat question to watch solved: a woman, who we'll eventually learn is Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her breakthrough role), marches up to a desk, her arms pinioned in a restraining brace, and proceeds to staple documents together quite without any apparent response to her unique situation. We then slam back 6 months to find a very different Lee, who seems totally impossible to square with the unflappable one we just meet. This Lee is painfully restrained and small, still kept at the emotional level of a girl (ballerinas and pink art direction haunt her in the early scenes), barely even able to commit to the voice-over with which she meekly presents her backstory. She's just out of "the institution", where she was treated as a suicide risk; the film elusively lets us know that she has no such impulse, and that she simply messed up during what was an otherwise perfectly routine attempt to cut herself with a kitchen knife while her mother isn't looking.

One of the greatest strengths of Secretary's strong script is that it never tries to explain Lee's behavior, allowing us to make whatever assumptions about her tragic or not backstory that we care to. Really, the only thing that matters about her self-abuse - which includes holding hot kettles against her leg, in addition to bleeding herself on whatever sharp object is handy - is that she herself doesn't seem tremendously reflective about it, operating out of a kind of dull autopilot to go along with the cloistered, unhappy family life she's stuck in, with people who only notice her much when they force themselves to, trapped in their own agonies otherwise.

It's when Lee takes a job as a secretary for the slippery lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader, the most obvious choice in the English-speaking world for this role, but no less effective), that Secretary launches its attention-grabbing central conceit: the submissive, self-abnegating Lee fits perfectly with Grey's own need to dominate and dictate and control. Instead of forming the kind of hate-filled abusive boss-employee relationship that most of us would make out of that situation, the two begin an erotically-charged relationship of domination and sadomasochism, right in the middle of the workplace.

Minor miracles abound in Secretary: one is that it manages to fashion itself as a story of two broken people finding a connection with each other that doesn't in any way suggest that their brokenness is responsible their colorful sexual tastes. Another is that it works, above all things, as a study of how two different personality types interact with each other without giving either actor explicit material to build a character from: Gyllenhaal, because Lee is inherently too quiet and receding to put much of herself out in the open, and Spader, because Grey is seen, in the film, entirely through the lens of Lee's perceptions, and he remains mystifying to her for much of the running time. Both actors nonetheless turn out extraordinary performances, quite possibly the best in both of their respective careers (a claim I'm slightly more eager to make for Gyllenhaal than for Spader). For both of them, the character is based in the feeling of being "off", not quite connected to anyone around them, and unable to express themselves. While virtually everything about Secretary is appealingly non-judgmental and matter-of-fact, the most progressive thing about it is perhaps the way that it positions Lee and Grey's BDSM activities as the way they express themselves and communicate with each other and find meaning in each other, one of the few times that sexual activity has been depicted in the movies as an extension of self with such generosity by the filmmakers.

With the screenplay deliberately providing a fragmentary understanding of the characters and scenario, the film makes us work for it; but it also makes the filmmakers work for it. Considering what it is, it's a little shocking how visual Secretary is, using an unexpectedly constrained color palette - purples and browns, nobody's first idea of two shades that belong together - with squared-off spaces and design elements, both of which give the film a contained, limited feeling that makes it intimate and also a bit pinching. The precise attitude of its main character, in other words, and for a low-budget film with such an obvious narrative hook to allow its mise en scène such prominence in building mood and shaping the development of Lee's arc is even more impressive than it was in 2002. It's so successfully controlled and limiting that when it allows a blast of red - a color used with incredible care throughout the movie - it's as startling and intense to us as it is to Lee.

Anything that works this hard at being a great character portrait is going to eventually have to deal with the gnarly issue of its story, and this is the point where Secretary fumbles. The film's last quarter, or near enough to it, starts amping up needlessly complications and out-of-nowhere melodrama, and it feels like a bit of a betrayal of the effortless littleness that dominates the film up to that point. Speed up Gyllenhaal's line deliveries and have any score less pensive than the one Angelo Badalementi provided, and the final quarter of Secretary could easily have come from one of those loud and daffy British working class comedies that were starting to die off right when this film was new. And what would be fine there is wildly out of tune here, so even as the film finds a sweet footing for its very final scenes, it has hopelessly mangled the spell of what went before.

But still, what went before is absolutely terrific, tight, and focused filmmaking. The movies of the early-'00s have not, as a class, remained in the general popular consciousness very well, and better films than Secretary from 2002 (a strong year for American filmmaking) have been obscured just as much as this one seems to have been. But 13 years is not so long, and with a little luck and care, perhaps this shall be able to regain its rightful spot as an effective, smart example of a breed of movie that didn't survive much past the year of its release.