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| Isabel Sandoval and Eamon Farren in Lingua Franca |
Cast: Isabel Sandoval, Eamon Farren, Lynn Cohen, Ivory Aquino, Megan Channel, Lev Gorn. Screenplay: Isabel Sandoval. Cinematography: Isaac Banks. Production design: Maxwell Nalevansky, Clint Ramos. Film editing: Isabel Sandoval. Music: Teresa Barrozo.
The problems facing the protagonist of Isabel Sandoval's Lingua Franca are even more urgent today than they were when the film was made. Sandoval herself plays Olivia, a transgender Filipina who works as a live-in caregiver for Olga (Lynn Cohen), an elderly woman on the verge of dementia. An undocumented immigrant, Olivia sends some of what she earns to her mother in the Philippines and pays much of the rest of it to a man who promises to marry her, which would allow her to get a green card. But when he announces that he's met someone he really wants to marry, she's left on her own, just as ICE is stepping up a crackdown in the Brighton Beach area where she lives. Then Olga's grandson Alex (Eamon Farren), who has just been released from prison, moves in with his grandmother. After initial wariness, Alex and Olivia develop a relationship. As writer and director, Sandoval handles the nuances of the situation well, giving us enough of Alex's own difficulties to understand why he may not be the ideal solution to Olivia's problems. As actress, she is also up to the task of portraying Olivia's mixture of hope and fear as a resolution to those problems presents itself. Except for a few scenes where the revelation of Olivia's sexual identity and the threat of deportation feel contrived, Sandoval mostly resists conventional plotting, and the bittersweet conclusion of the film is deftly achieved. Lingua Franca is one of those movies that need to be better known.
