A
large number of persons, especially women, work on a temporary
basis. We are familiar with substitute teachers and extras
in films as temporary jobs, but the bulk of the "temps" are
office workers. In Temporary Girl, codirected
and written by Lisa Kotin and Johnny C. White, Jr., we view why temps exist and how
they are treated on the job. The heroine of the film, forty-year-old
Jeanette Byrnestein (played by the director/writer), has been
a temp for fifteen years because she hopes for a break to
work as an actress, though her husband (played by David Pasquesi)
has long since abandoned dreams of becoming a rock star and
instead manages a record store. Her parents are frantic because
she has neither a permanent job nor a grandchild so that they
can boast to their friends. However, the setting for most
of the film is the office of Hungwell, Peterman and Cox, where
the female supervisor has hired her as a secretary for the
day. We see how Jeanette struggles to fit auditions during
her lunch break, and how she is once even stuck with the check
at an expensive restaurant by an inconsiderate agent. The
boss at the office makes impossible demands on work to be
done ASAP and then offers Jeanette a permanent job, which
she turns down. Coworkers bother her with chatter as if she
were hired to improve morale. Yet while working at the office,
she duplicates copies of a resume, checks for messages from
her answering service, and she flatters a gay coworker into
videotaping her though he is unaware that she has been told
to present the resume and tape to the agent before the end
of the working day. In the end, she loses her husband but
gets the acting job that she always wanted. Many characters
in the film are drawn from Lisa Kotin's own experience as
a temp. Although this delightfully humorous film is clearly
feminist in exposing abuse of females by males as well as
by a female boss and in portraying how temps are subjected
to discrimination and are universally misunderstood, the ending
suggests that temps should not be underestimated as they put
up with all the hardships with definite career goals in mind.
Temporary Girl is a welcome antidote to the
earlier The Temp (1993), in which the heroine
has a Fatal Attraction (1987) agenda of her
own. MH
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