if only…
by Douglas Messerli
Isobel Sandoval (screenwriter and director) Lingua
Franca / 2019, general release 2020
This morning before I sat down to write it
dawned on me that perhaps in some future time the film I had seen and admired
yesterday, Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca, might be perceived simply as
a heterosexual romance instead of a film focused on which the very serious
complications concerning the central character Olivia (played by Sandoval
herself), most notably that she is an immigrant without a green card working as
a caretaker for an elderly Russian-Jewish woman, Olga (Lynn Cohen) residing in Brighton Beach,
Brooklyn, at a time in which President Trump has illegally ordered ICE
(Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to arrest people like Olivia while
they go about their daily lives.
In
this film, however, the man with whom Olivia falls in love, Alex (Eamon
Farren), Olga’s handsome grandson, living in the same house, has seemingly
inexplicably stolen her passport, the only document which might allow her
through marriage to become a US citizen and to gain access to a green card and
the legality which would take away her fears of suddenly being returned to her
native country, The Philippines, as Olga’s previous nurse Wanda was.
In
a future when these ICE problems have disappeared, Sandoval’s narrative might
simply center primarily upon the mixed feelings of the rather immature Alex—who
also has serious problems with alcohol and, accordingly, in maintaining a
job—has about getting married to the woman with whom he has been sleeping and
is, quite apparently, now in love. The issues here might instead be centered
upon their cultural differences, Alex’s erratic behavior, and upon his
dependence upon his boyhood friends who clearly prefer that he remain trapped
in the teenage world-views which they have never escaped.
But
in the world we inhabit in the present, things are far more nightmarish, as one
of Alex’s drunken friends, staying overnight in Olga’s house, lifts Olivia’s
passport and a CD from her bedroom drawer, passing in on to Alex, something
which the latter never mentions. But the very fact that Alex has held onto
these items argues that his good intentions to help out Olivia and, perhaps, reiterate
his professed love has all been a kind of pretense.
At
one moment, he even appears to have switched off the apartment’s electric
power— terrifying Olivia in the increasing would of paranoia which she
inhabits—to suggest that ICE may be on her trail. Soon after, Alex goes even
further with a clumsy lie, telling her that he has seen a man in a ski-mask
leaving her room. Why, asks Olivia’s good friend Trixie (Ivory Aquino), would
an ICE agent dress up in a ski-mask?
Yet,
despite all of these incredible obstacles, the fact that near the end of this
work—which might remind any knowledgeable cinema buff of a film by Hong Kong
director Wong Kar-wai—Alex, after spending a romantic night in a local bar
dancing with Olivia to the standard love song “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,”
appears to be more intent upon marrying this Filipina from the Cebu region more
than ever becomes confusing. The lovers even briefly discuss what size family
they might each desire as we almost buy into the film’s title by recognizing
that the “lingua franca” which the movie touts is love.
As
in any traditional Hollywood romance, when the couple wakes up the next morning
in a hotel room with the male beginning a sentence with “About last night…” we
know the lovely fantasy the film has woven has come to an end, just as it does
in this case.
I
was highly amused by comments by many of the critics, male and female, who all
seemed to concur that Sandoval’s great movie somehow ran out of steam in its
last minutes by not more carefully explaining why the couple’s relationship
could not last.
Writing on the Roger Ebert site, Christy Lemire, for example, wrote:
“Sandoval wisely refrains from spelling
everything out about these characters and their backstories, but her film might
be a bit too understated. It ultimately runs out of steam just as it’s reaching
its most compelling point, leaving us hanging emotionally. Still, the dreamlike
mood she’s set lingers afterward.”
Or,
as Dennis Harvey concurs in Variety:
“There’s a simultaneous delicacy and
straightforwardness to Lingua Franca that stamps Isabel Sandoval’s third
feature with a distinctive directorial sensibility—even if her script
eventually muffles some of the film’s early promise. …Nor does the ambiguous
fadeout offer much satisfaction. To a point, Sandoval’s commitment to intriguing
understatement comes off as intelligent restraint. In the end, though, a little
head-on confrontation and plot resolution surely wouldn’t have hurt.”
One wonders if either of these writers and the others who have argued
similarly have ever seen Damien Chazelle’s La La Land in which Emma
Stone, despite her clear love of Ryan Gosling, intentionally chooses the wrong
man and lives somewhat happily ever after; or Catherine Deneuve who, in The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg purposely abandons her young romeo Nino Castelnuovo
for an older and wealthy man. Or, for that matter. The central couple of Wong
Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love; the list might go on forever.
Heterosexual romances in film, I might remind them, just as in life. do not
always end up in perfect bliss.
LGBTQ films, moreover, seldom end up in standard romantic notions, and
that, obviously, is what is missing in my attempts above to imagine Sandoval’s
film being located in the precise genre in which in any sane world it might
belong. But in 2020—a throw-back year which in every way possible has retreated
to the cruel days of hate while wiping away so many recent representations of
social responsibility and loving that one might have previously imagined—the
fact that Olivia (including the actor who performs her and has written and
directed this work) is a transsexual woman, skews the entire fabric of this
finely wrought fabulation in the direction of a life that inevitably is
battered by the winds of fear, bigotry, and outright horror for both lovers.
Women like Olivia must generally seek out men whose love or marriage
they must purchase, as has her friend Trixie has, a companion (permanent or
temporary) to escape the terrors of living as a woman with a passport from
another country on which her former male name is her sole identification. Yes,
there is the constant worry as an illegal alien she might be arrested at any
moment, but there are just as great fears that she will never find anyone who
truly loves her or might, if her previous sexuality were to revealed, be
subject to deadly violence.
In
a sense, Alex, in toying with her own fears (stealing her passport, controlling
the apartment lights, and creating a fiction that suggests that ICE is
following her movements) and in his own return to alcohol has played out just
such violence, even if he mercurially loves her as well and even visits
websites about the logistics of New York State marriage.
He
may even see himself as a kind of hero by enabling her to release some of her
layered anxieties, but somewhat like Stephen Rea in The Crying Game, who
attempts so save a transgender woman (not a transsexual one who actually has
undergone a medical procedure to alter her birth sex) with whom he has
experienced a deep relationship, his love will perhaps always be mixed with a
strong element of disgust.
Sandoval fortunately doesn’t linger on this issue. For if Alex deludes
himself into believing that he might brave the mockery and violence of the
brutes surround him who will surely dole out if he were to actually make such a
commitment, the sensitive viewer of this cinematic masterwork knows that the
hero, Olivia, will surely be better able to buy her way into the
American Dream rather than waiting for it to happen naturally. Besides, as all
LGBTQ people know very well, what most people perceive as something they might
define as natural are usually quite blind to everything else.
Los Angeles, September 27, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My
Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).
