Working Woman is a disturbing take on workplace harassment in the post-Weinstein era

Three stars

It has been 30 years since Melanie Griffith's character jumped the social divide in Working Girl, leaving behind her pals in the typing pool to forge herself an executive career.

Much has changed for on-screen women in the workplace over three decades, much has stayed the same, and as a viewer, I am interested to see how filmmakers explore storylines and characters in a post-Weinstein film landscape.

Israeli filmmaker Michal Aviad explores this landscape with a slow-to-build but powerful tale of workplace sexual harassment.

It finds itself released in the middle of the #MeToo era, though the filmmaker has been working on the production since 2012, and frankly the subject matter is sadly as old as workplaces.

In Michal Aviad's story, Orna (Liron Ben-Slush) is a working woman, not a girl; despite making Griffith his film's hero, Mike Nichols still didn't give his Tess McGill her adulthood.

Orna is a mother to three, and has been a stay-at-home parent and worked at a daycare.

But as the bills stack up at home and her husband (Oshri Cohen) struggles to bring his dream of opening a restaurant to fruition, she finds a wonderful opportunity as assistant to property developer Benny (Menashe Noy).

Orna is thrilled to have found not just a bill-paying job, but a profession she can learn and be mentored in.

The property Benny is building is being marketed to French Jews looking to retire in Israel with a sea view, and Orna finds that she has a flair for sales and her high-school French finally has some use.

She is good at her job.

But soon the attentive observations of her boss - she looks nice with her hair down and she ought to wear it that way more often - lead to a rebuffed kiss.

A trip away in which Orna personally delivers a handful of lucrative sales leads to a late-night sexual assault.

Why would a man try anything on in a country where every woman has had military training?

That's the kind of flippant question going through my mind as I sat down to watch this film, and I really appreciated Michal Avian's storytelling and especially Liron Ben-Slush's subtle work as Orna in correcting my naive thinking.

I'm embarrassed to have thought it.

The weight of factors in Orna's life trap her in a hopeless situation - the income her family needs, the commission that could start her husband's business.

Ben-Slush's castmates give performances of equal strength, thanks to Aviad working with them for some time before the film shot to build that characterisation.

Benny especially might have been a cardboard villain in weaker hands.

Aviad builds slowly, with long scenes and silences as much as dialogue.

A documentary filmmaker by training, she employs a hand-held camera to come in close to her performers.

While there are no happy endings in a story like this, in film or in real life, it concludes with a sense of optimism and believability.

A Hollywood filmmaker would have made melodrama or schmaltz of this, but Aviad has a steely resolve to go with her cinematic skills.

This may be a hard watch for some people, but this very fact makes it a must-watch for almost everyone.