Support the Girls | Little White Lies

Sup­port the Girls

27 Jun 2019 / Released: 28 Jun 2019

Group of five women in red tops and jeans standing and embracing in a bar setting.
Group of five women in red tops and jeans standing and embracing in a bar setting.
4

Anticipation.

Bujalski is an astonishing filmmaker who finds humanity and humour in the most unlikely places.

4

Enjoyment.

The definition of a cathartic experience.

5

In Retrospect.

A neorealist take on our capitalist times, reaffirming the essential need for camaraderie every day of the working week.

Andrew Bujalski’s work­place com­e­dy, set in a Hoot­ers-style sports bar, offers a sly cri­tique of the patriarchy.

Bras are at once a sym­bol of fem­i­nin­i­ty and an emblem of the misog­y­ny inher­ent to cap­i­tal­ism. Sup­posed to pro­vide sup­port to girls, they are also uncom­fort­able cages restrain­ing the move­ments of half of the population.

The women work­ing at sports bar Dou­ble Wham­mies in Andrew Bujalski’s Sup­port the Girls wear push-up bras – as part of their uni­form. They look good, but they are here to work, and they’re tired. Only the young new recruits, who are unex­pect­ed­ly pressed into ser­vice straight after their job inter­views, find their lit­tle red tops fun. But it’s only a mat­ter of time before they too see their out­fits as the sti­fling dis­guis­es they are.

Dou­ble Wham­mies, how­ev­er, prides itself on being a main­stream” estab­lish­ment. In her posi­tion as gen­er­al man­ag­er, Lisa (Regi­na Hall, final­ly giv­en a real lead part to work with after so many great sup­port­ing turns) does her best to embody and encour­age her establishment’s fam­i­ly val­ues. Unlike their men­ac­ing chain com­peti­tors, her joint isn’t about wait­ress­es being casu­al­ly inap­pro­pri­ate with their row­dy male clientele.

Fathers and hus­bands come to Dou­ble Wham­mies to be tak­en care of by friend­ly women. Lisa, mean­while, treats her employ­ees like her sib­lings or chil­dren, ready to bend the rules to help them, even in the midst of chaos. Lisa is an angel of the ser­vice sec­tor, at once humane and pro­fes­sion­al, patient and resilient. It’s the world around her that is less than ideal.

When an employ­ee runs into trou­ble and bad­ly needs a lawyer’s ser­vices, Lisa organ­is­es an ille­gal car wash to raise funds. Luck­i­ly, the clients don’t care much about where the mon­ey goes, but this dis­in­ter­est in any­thing beneath the sur­face is a sign of things to come. The dehu­man­is­ing effect of cap­i­tal­ism isn’t Bujalski’s main tar­get, however.

Because he is work­ing in a neo­re­al­ist genre, it doesn’t come as any real sur­prise that nei­ther work nor her mar­riage become eas­i­er for Lisa (which doesn’t mean that the ensu­ing turn of events isn’t heart­break­ing – expec­ta­tion isn’t always con­sol­ing). It’s what she does in the face of her insur­mount­able dif­fi­cul­ties that reveals the director’s deep under­stand­ing of what it means to be a cog in the machine of our cru­el 21st cen­tu­ry economy.

Lisa’s basic modus operan­di for day-to-day sur­vival – which, in the case of the film, begins with a thief trapped in the vents and builds to oth­er shop floor cat­a­stro­phes. She wills her­self to be help­ful to the bit­ter end. Oth­er employ­ees have dif­fer­ent cop­ing strate­gies: Maci (the sim­ply unbe­liev­able Haley Lu Richard­son) is the most upbeat per­son who’s ever worked in a din­er or any­where, and that is as much part of her per­son­al­i­ty as it is a put-on – it doesn’t real­ly mat­ter to her whether the two are distinct.

By con­trast, sin­gle moth­er Danyelle (Shay­na McHayle) takes no shit from any­one. But one trait unites them: they all love work­ing togeth­er. Lisa’s fam­i­ly wasn’t just an idea. When all else fails, what remains and gets you out of bed in the morn­ing is anoth­er sup­port mech­a­nism, and one that won’t dig into your flesh and which you can nei­ther sell, nor buy.

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