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