Secretary<br></br>The Truth About Charlie

Sex, lies and sadomasochistic typing

Steven Shainberg's Secretary wilfully breaks one of the cardinal rules of cinema: never squander your most memorable image in the first shot. Enter Maggie Gyllenhaal in a smart, severe business suit, arms stretched straight in a metal yoke with shackles on her wrists, carrying papers in her mouth. In she sways, erect but with an easy swing, and just as you're recovering from the strangeness of the image comes the crowning touch – she works a stapler with her chin.

This is so gracefully outrageous that everything that follows feels almost redundant. If you saw this image in isolation as a video installation or a piece of performance art, it would be so pithily concise that you wouldn't need to add a narrative to explain it. Secretary strains pretty hard to match this opening coup. Even when the film is at its most laboured, however, it has something pretty good going for it and that is Maggie Gyllenhaal. Chances are, you hadn't heard of her a month ago; you'll have heard of her now because Secretary has attracted so much coverage. It's a classic case of a small, relatively (and I do mean relatively) ordinary film putting an extraordinary performer on the map.

Secretary is a delicate subject treated indelicately, as black romantic farce. A masochistic young woman finds her ideal sadistic boss and eagerly yields to his programme of humiliations – which run from berating her typing errors to the altogether more exotic. Lee, a shy suburban girl with a yen for self-mutilation, takes a job with lawyer E Edward Grey (James Spader). Not much legal work seems to get done in Grey's office, other than a lot of phoning and old-fashioned typing, and the atmosphere's not exactly conventional either: the décor is something between a seedy motel and a Buñuel bordello, while the lamps in the corridor seem to be inspired by Cocteau via the Coens. Based on a short story by Mary Gaitskill, Secretary is always slyly good-humoured even (especially) in its darkest moments, but doesn't quite seem to know where it's going from one moment to the next. Erin Cressida Wilson is credited as screenwriter, and jointly credited with Shainberg for "story adaptation". However the division of labour worked, you somehow sense an uneasy rift between script and direction. The dialogue is teasingly off-kilter and fragmented, cleverly playing on the etiquette of office life, and resembling an Edward Albee game with the loaded banalities of everyday language (a typical exchange: "I feel... shy" – "Do you want a hot chocolate?").

Yet the way Shainberg styles all this suggests a director with no clear signature. Lee's domestic humiliations recall Todd Solondz; the suburban unease and kitsch-expressionist décor is just that bit too close to David Lynch (whose composer Angelo Badalamenti contributes a twinkly, facetious score); there's that cliché of American suburban malaise, the shot of the heroine floating bored in a blue swimming pool, that harks back to The Graduate by way of Jane Campion's Sweetie.

You're never quite sure how much is really happening – how much is Lee's, or Grey's, or the movie's fantasy. But too many elements jump out at you like ideas out of nowhere, hard to place even in a context of dream reality: Grey using darts to dial a phone number, a visit to a lurid laundromat-diner. There's a brief, crazy image of Lee saddled up with a carrot in her mouth, kneeling in the decorative office fountain; but it seems to belong in a totally different world from the episode where Grey jerks off on her bottom and – now this is what I call a telling touch – leaves a semen stain up the back of her blouse.

For all its twistedness, the genuinely shocking thing about Secretary is that it's a romance – Little Red Riding Hood falling for, and taming, the Wolf. James Spader is all the more striking a Wolf now that his formerly angelic creepiness is taking on the blasted lineaments of Christopher Walken. The film is a hit-and-missed opportunity, finally too riddled with quirky US indie commonplaces – not least the casting of Jeremy Davies, American film's most incorrigible twitcher, as Lee's gauche boy at home. But see the film for Gyllenhaal, whose apple-cheeked, cheerful hamster look – she could easily play a Waltons cousin, or Florence from The Magic Roundabout – is perfectly made for subverting the ingenue-victim stereotype. Her Lee, too perverse and multiple to be pinned down, is full of both mischief and agony: whether practising her phone manner in a breathy voice, studiously listening to an S&M self-help tape, or masturbating furiously. It's a performance of compelling nerve and joyous cheek, and Gyllenhaal's cool, cryptic look to camera in the final shot lets us know in no uncertain terms that she's arrived.

It's hard to know quite in what category of calamities to place The Truth About Charlie, Jonathan Demme's version of Charade, Stanley Donen's comedy thriller of 1963. Worst remakes ever? Most inept films made by major directors? Worst Americans-in-Paris movies? A teeth-grindingly skittish Thandie Newton dons Audrey Hepburn's raincoat and kitten heels, while Cary Grant's shoes are filled by a length of MDF with a beret jammed on top (Mark Wahlberg to you). Newton's ingenue arrives in Paris to confront several impenetrable mysteries. Why did her husband have several names, passports and false moustaches? Why does the cop investigating his death wear one glove? Why does Ted Levine's villain sit around with acupuncture needles in his head? Why did Demme think it would be cute to have Charles Aznavour serenade Newton during the love scenes, like a singing waiter? Demme clearly wanted to let his hair down after his recent worthy projects. But even Beloved felt zappy compared to the scenes here where Tim Robbins spouts impenetrable Special-Ops expositions apparently copied from a spare episode of 24, or the climax where the assembled cast stand for several minutes snarling at each other in the rain. The film is supposedly Demme's tribute to the Nouvelle Vague; calling the entire staff of Cahiers du Cinéma "surrender monkeys" would have been less of an insult.

j.romney@independent.co.uk